Oneirophobia
by Scythers
Summary: Nightmares in adulthood are often associated with outside stressors or exist concurrently with another mental disorder. Ken just wishes they would stop. [FINISHED]
1. one

_Author's Notes: I have been working on this story for ages. Originally it was supposed to be a one shot for a challenge issued by my friend J—write a story that somehow includes the lyrics of Akira Yamaoka's "Waiting For You." This metamorphosed into this huge, crazy thing that did not seem like it would ever stop. I lost sight of the challenge after a point, too, but let's just say it was at least inspired in part by the lyrics._

_This is another Kensuke set in some sort of AU future. The readers can decide if it has ties to Sweet Dreams, a similar story of mine. Ken is nearing middle age in reality, but age varies in his dreams._

Nightmares in adulthood are often associated with outside stressors or exist concurrently with another mental disorder. Ken just wishes they would stop.

* * *

**

* * *

**

Oneirophobia

**

* * *

****

* * *

**

**1.**

Daisuke hates his suit. He really, really hates his suit. It's ugly. It's too big. It's made of a fiber that doesn't breathe. It makes him feel itchy and it smells weird and it is missing three buttons that are crucial in holding the front closed. Whenever he can, he pulls at the collar, straightens the cornflower blue tie, smoothes down the lapels—he does anything he can to create the illusion of restlessness rather than discomfort. He hates his suit because he hates being removed from his natural element of khaki shorts and cotton shirts, plain colors and thin fabrics, comfort and informality. But he must wear this thing right now, for Ken, and he is miserable because of it.

The air is muggy and the gray, heavy, funky, stifling monstrosity sticks to and scrapes his skin, creating red patches that swell up whenever he rubs them. The air conditioner in the limousine is broken and the driver hasn't even bothered to apologize. Daisuke looks out the window and wishes he could open it. The tinting is dark, but through it he can make out a group of people loitering on the sidewalk and watching the limousine as it rolls down the street.

He sits beside Ken in the back of the limousine that is part of a slow-moving funeral procession. No one else wanted to ride with them, so they are alone, and they both like it that way. It wasn't anything personal, their being alone, because they would have accommodated anyone in need of a ride had the situation arose; but everyone saw how close they were sitting together and realized that they could not intrude. The transportation arrangements worked out anyway since less people than expected decided to attend. The number of people going to the graveyard right now is nothing compared to the number that came to Osamu's funeral all those years ago, where pages and pages of signatures and prayers filled the complimentary guest book.

_This feels just like I'm falling_, Ken thinks and then decides that he doesn't want to think anymore. He turns to numbers instead, unequivocal numbers that don't understand emotion, and he begins to calculate. After the burial ceremony, everyone is expected to go back to his and Daisuke's apartment for a somber reception. There will be plenty of food to eat since Daisuke ordered more than he should have (although he did so with good intentions, so no harm done). Methodically, Ken pieces together a mathematical function to preoccupy his idle, thoughtless time:

"It'll end up being kilograms of potato salad consumed (P) in respect to the number of people who decide to eat it (N)," he says quietly. "P(N), of course, and from that . . ."

"Don't start," Daisuke says. The warning is there, but his voice is too tired to make the subtext impressive. "Ichijouji, don't start. Please."

". . . we know that an average adult consumes . . ."

"Ichijoui."

". . . but that also depends on how good it tastes. Pleasure derived from taste can't be measured quantitatively unless we determine a scale for it . . ."

Daisuke touches the other man's hand. "Ichijouji."

"We could introduce multiple variables to measure taste in respect to the amount of mayonnaise or potato chunks, but only after we find out what the utility—" And then Ken starts sobbing.

It's raining when the burial ceremony starts. The affair is gray and dreary, appropriate for the occasion that feels like a pivotal scene in a tragic movie, but Ken hates the wetness because it makes his bones ache. Daisuke continues to hate his suit and enviously regards Ken, who has managed to wear a pinstriped three-piece without discomfort. Together they stand beneath an umbrella just as everyone else does, and the attendees' collection of black shields creates a sketchy circle around the open grave. A group of professional-looking caretakers put harnesses on the casket in preparation for the lowering.

Most people brought sentimental things to place atop the casket: flowers, coins, framed and unframed photos, even a crayon-colored picture drawn by a little neighbor girl who had never actually met the deceased face-to-face. Ken has nothing to offer aside from his presence; when the attendees move forward to leave their gifts, he stays withdrawn. Surprisingly enough, _Daisuke _leaves the dry safety of the umbrella and begins searching through his deep pockets. Ken watches him with dull inquisitiveness.

Daisuke constantly seems like he is about to say something as he moves the gift around in his fingers, but he ultimately remains silent. He is holding a simple brass key in his hands. When Ken sees the key, its metal cross work darkened with the years-old oil and sweat from Daisuke's hands, he immediately knows which lock it belongs in.

That is the key to Ken's childhood home, the apartment he lived in until he left for college. Daisuke received his own duplicate key when Ken's parents acknowledged him as part of the family.

(Ken stuttered and flushed and lost all composure when this happened, the intimate nature of the relationship revealed, but his mother only smiled and went out to the store to have another key made.

_It's easier for you this way_, she explained to Daisuke when she returned with the duplicate and an optional Hello Kitty keychain. Ken was lying on the couch with a cold compress on his forehead, recovering from the shock of being outed. _This way you can come and go as you please, right?_)

Daisuke knew what the gesture meant—it represented a token of good faith expressing how Ichijouji-san trusted him to take care of her son—and he kept it on his person until he and Ken moved into their own place and never had to worry about locked doors keeping them apart again. It was her gift to him, and now Daisuke is giving it back because it is too late for thankful words alone.

(_Ken-chan, you want to see him all the time too_, his mother said pleasantly. _Don't look at me like that. Mothers always know about what's going on with their children.)_

Daisuke mouths his gratitude against the key and then sets it by a bouquet of fragrant white carnations.

That gift gave him the determination he needed to pursue Ken and their fledgling relationship. He worked so hard to keep things from falling apart after every pitfall. That's not to say things are perfect now—jewels always have defects, and Daisuke most often sees those defects when he looks into Ken's eyes—but being given the opportunity to open up around Ken and his family had provided him with hope for the future. The hurried, more intimate experiences were no longer tainted by deceit and the fear of discovery. Casual affection while in plain view became a norm. Acceptance meant the world to them.

"You should have told me you wanted to give something," Ken murmurs when Daisuke moves back under the umbrella. He lifts his free hand to smooth away the raindrops clinging to the other man's cheek. "You're going to end up sick."

"Ichijouji," Daisuke says, "it's okay to grieve even when people can see you."

Ken looks away and watches as the casket is lowered into the ground. The ceremony is wet and cold, dreary and gray, and silent because no one has anything left to say. Placing the casket evenly turns out to be difficult because the dirt has become mush, but the caretakers grunt and strain and eventually get the box settled. Slowly, the other attendees shift away from the grave and mill over by where the limousines are parked in an orderly line. Even the caretakers leave Ken and Daisuke behind in favor of having something to drink.

"I should have . . ." Ken can't finish that sentence. There are too many _should have_'s and _could have_'s to combine into one lamentation. He shuts his eyes. The umbrella shakes a little and he barely notices when Daisuke's hand overlaps his to steady it.

"You're an idiot," Daisuke points out, but his tone is affectionate. "None of this is your fault."

"I should have . . ."

"Stop that."

Ken sighs and Daisuke looks at the headstone. Still sitting atop the casket, the key glimmers in the way a dying star might, copper-red and framed by darkness. In that darkness the white carnations seem to have wilted and the little neighbor girl's drawing is no more than a smeared page of colors. What might have once been a crayon angel holding a harp is now a nightmarish amalgamation of oily blue, sickly yellow, and silvery gray markings.

"_She's gone to Heaven now_," Daisuke reads from the epitaph. The words are inscribed on a beautiful copper plate anchored to the headstone. Below them are a set of dates and a finely carved name.

Involuntarily, Ken begins trembling again. "Why won't she come back down?" he asks.

"That just isn't how the world works." Daisuke shrugs. "You can't change that."

"You always slice with Occam's Razor! Maybe she has someone she loves more than me with her now."

"Now you're really being an idiot," Daisuke says, studying Ken's hardened profile. Ken looks much older than he should. Lately he has been under great physical and mental strain—he is a violin string one pluck away from snapping. "What did the doctor say?"

"She died of a heart attack."

"No, not her doctor. Yours."

"Last week I told him in no uncertain terms that I'm not going to be coming back."

"You're going to have to apologize to him soon if 'no uncertain terms' means what I think it does," Daisuke says tiredly. "This isn't a good time to be prideful."

"His help is something I don't want or need," Ken says. "I just need you."

Daisuke focuses on the casket. "I can't protect you from everything," he says. The next pause is heavy and dreadful. "I wish I could. But I can't."

"Knowing you're trying is enough for me."

"Wrong! You're blaming yourself right now for your mother's death—and who knows what else, you don't confide in me—and all I can do is say 'No, that is not your fault' or 'You do not need to beat yourself up.' Get real, Ichijouji. You say you need me and yet you're farther away than you have ever been."

The sky splits apart: sudden thunder accompanies an even more sudden intensification of the rain's downpour. Daisuke shivers and hates his suit because it provides no practical protection, and Ken isn't standing close enough to share his body heat (despite how little of it is left these days). But Ken brushes his thumb against Daisuke's. Maybe that is enough for both of them right now.

They stand in silence for a long time while the other attendees' voices drift in and out of hearing range.

Then: "I don't want to argue anymore," Daisuke whispers. "Please."

"Only last week we visited her, didn't we?" Ken asks, effectively changing the subject. "She looked healthy. We ate home-cooked ramen and you told her that red pepper flakes can go a long way when flavoring noodles."

"I think she said that I make an excellent housewife," Daisuke says and bares his teeth for a weak grin. "I had to explain that I cooked because you're a real disaster in the kitchen. No intuitive reasoning. Who the hell uses soybean flour when making a torte?"

"That's all you, Daisuke. You insist on having twenty specific types of flour and you never get around to using half of them. Our grocery bill is insane."

"She said you ought to eat more, anyway." Dependable fingers touch and then run across Ken's flank, searching for the hem of his formal pinstriped jacket. "You refused to let me cook noodles for a week after because of all the servings she gave you."

Ken tries on a smile and is surprised when it fits well. Although he cannot remember much of his brother's funeral—aside from carrying the portrait, all that black crepe, the white flowers, and Oikawa's leering on the side—he does remember everyone standing around afterward and talking through their grief. This is how people deal with death: reminiscing, chatting, joking, supporting one another, and even crying a little but not ashamedly. Already he feels better, and he inches closer to Daisuke regardless of how a few cold, nimble fingers have violated his jacket and are sliding against his exposed skin.

"Mom would be so proud of your handiwork," Ken says dryly.

"You see? She's still here with us," Daisuke says as he leans over to kiss Ken's neck. His lips are warm. "She is in your heart and will be there for you as long as you keep her memory."

"If she were really here, I imagine she'd throw something at us and tell us to put a muzzle on our hormones until we were alone."

"Like when we were kids."

"I'd wait forever for you and your hormones," Ken quips. "I love you."

Daisuke smiles. "Then let's head back to the others so we can get this reception going. Once everyone has gone home, maybe the waiting can stop for a while. What do you think?"

"Well . . ."

The defects linger in Ken's eyes, ruining their inherent brilliance, and Daisuke hates that more than he hates wearing a suit. Hesitation always seems to magnify the imperfections they have a hard time acknowledging during the lighter moments. Daisuke continues to smile, but his fingers stop fiddling with the opal-colored shirt buttons. "Well—what?"

"Do you . . . Daisuke, do you think she forgives me?"

Warm lips disappear from his neck. "Forgives you for what?"

"For killing Osamu."

"Ichijouji!" Daisuke sounds scandalized. His fingers curl up in the material of Ken's shirt and he pulls a little, tugging, as though he will earn keener attentiveness. "How can you say something like that?"

"I wasn't the one she wanted. I merely replaced him. Then I caused her so much pain when I ran away to the Digital World. Even after I got back, there was still hurt in her eyes. Anyone could see it—even you. Moving out broke her heart, too, but I had to because I love you and I wanted to live with you. She said it was okay, right? But I knew it wasn't. I was being so selfish."

Daisuke doesn't respond at first, and Ken receives the impression that something isn't lining up correctly. He cannot identify where the feeling originates from, but there it is anyway, and soon things seem far colder and darker than before. Unease precipitates in his stomach, adrenaline kicks into gear, and panic flutters in his chest like a caged bird.

"Shut the fuck up."

_No, he's supposed to say—_Ken's throat constricts. ". . . What?"

"I'm so sick of your bullshit," Daisuke hisses. Those once comforting fingers wrench at the shirt and then release it. The umbrella falls and wheels across the ground, directed by the wind. "I have had it up to here"—he indicates eye-level—"with your angst. Your mother had a heart attack and now she's dead. And I hope you're happy! Because you know what?"

"_What?_"

Daisuke roughly pushes Ken in the direction of the grave. "You _are _the reason she's dead. No one wanted to tell you because no one likes a sad sack. Too bad keeping the truth from you didn't help matters. So go wallow in the mud, pig."

"But—it's—it's not my fault! I'm just being self-deprecating—"

"You are a horrible liar," he says and stalks closer, making Ken back dangerously close to the sloppy hole. "You became the Kaiser and you had your fun by fucking with all of us. It felt good, didn't it? Sometimes I look in your eyes and I see him waiting in there. I know you're going to betray us one day by picking up his mantle again. Killing your own mother is proof positive!"

"I will never do that!" Ken yelps. "It's been so long—decades—I don't even think about him—don't you know that? You always say that I'm a different person—"

"You are legally blind. (And I thought I told you to shut up!) Haven't you ever noticed that I'm lying? Right through my teeth." To illustrate, Daisuke clacks his jaws together; his resulting grin is demented and too bright. "I fell in love with you and now you're gone. All that's left is this pathetic, servile shell that is waiting for the Kaiser to return so it does not have to think anymore—_Ichijouji, don't you dare start crying_!"

"You shouldn't be saying this! You're . . . you're supposed to say . . ."

"Oh." Daisuke blinks and the malice abruptly disappears from his expression. Another smile forms and this one is the private kind he only shares with Ken whenever he feels loving and tender. "Oh, I'm sorry. What was I saying? Hey—are you all right?"

Ken sighs with relief and reaches for the other man, who accepts him (albeit confusedly) into an embrace. The rain has soaked them to the bone by now but they do not care. "You weren't saying anything," Ken mumbles against a wet shoulder. "We were standing just like this. Do you want to go to the reception now?"

Beat. "I don't want to go anywhere with someone as disgusting as you."

"Daisuke-kun?"

"Don't call me that!"

Then, without warning, Daisuke shoves Ken hard enough to make him lose his footing. Ken tries to regain his balance, but there is no hope of fighting the fearsome pull of gravity and fate. He falls over into the grave. His head cracks against the coffin first; his body squashes the carnations, knocks the key into the mud, and breaks the glass of one framed portrait. Quick heat seeps through his hair and between his fingers—_that's blood, isn't it?_—he's bleeding—there is too much of it and it feels warmer than Daisuke's lips had on his neck. He holds up his hand and sees that the glass had sliced open his palm along the girdle of Venus and most of his lifeline. The blood is thicker than usual and maybe more purplish, as though it hasn't oxygenated properly. Upon sitting up and brushing the sore spot on the back of his head, he knows that he is bleeding from there too.

Dazedly he looks up into the rain at Daisuke, who is leaning over the grave's edge. From seemingly out of nowhere, Daisuke procures a deep-scooped shovel. There is such malevolence on his face, such dark intentions, and part of Ken dies from such a sight.

Now Ken understands he is dreaming. He is having a nightmare. Nothing here is real. This nightmare in particular he has experienced several times before; while each ending is different, they usually never climax as violently as this one does. Daisuke was supposed to have said "I don't think you're selfish, you know, because you love me" and then Ken was supposed to have smiled. They also should have kissed. One time they ended up dying in a car accident on the way to the reception, but that death had been instantaneous and not quite as real or personal as the current version. Ken watches Daisuke begin to shovel mud into the hole. Sure, he could climb out easily enough, but for some reason he cannot move and the lucidity of the dream frightens him even more.

"I'm sorry, love," Daisuke says as he works on the next shovelful, "but your subconscious has a quota to fill."

Quotas. Ken prefers handling numbers to thinking, after all.

Soon the mud is high enough to touch his chin. He cannot hope to escape this slick and thick and shiny entombment. Daisuke shovels more mud in, unfazed, and it rises over Ken's mouth, nose, ears, eyes—until not even a tendril of blue hair can be seen once he is entirely buried alive with his mother.


	2. two

_Author's Notes: Since the semester is over, I shouldn't be so tardy on posting new chapters. Of course, I don't have an actual posting schedule devised for this—so it doesn't matter anyway! This chapter is shorter in comparison to some of the others. _

Nightmares in adulthood are often associated with outside stressors or exist concurrently with another mental disorder. Ken just wishes they would stop.

* * *

**

* * *

**

Oneirophobia

**

* * *

**

**

* * *

**

**2.**

Ken opens his eyes. He is driving on a highway at a speed close to eighty kilometers per hour, and Daisuke is sitting in the passenger seat. While focused on the road ahead, Ken can peripherally see Daisuke fiddling with the tailor's pins that are to secure some temporary alterations. It figured that Daisuke didn't own a suit and the only suit they could find on such short notice barely fit. The tailor looked devastated when they had to leave—_like, right now­­—_and the best he could do for them was hand over a box of pins with the hope they might create something presentable en route to the wedding.

Ken doesn't know he is asleep. This is how his dreams usually are.

Daisuke grunts at the pins, accidentally stabs the pad of his thumb, and yelps. Before Ken can ask and admonish, a reflexive arm smacks him in the face and dislodges the glasses he needs to see well. The world blurs into a dreamlike haze of astigmatism, the car starts shimmying, and both driver and passenger can't repress the frightening conception of their vehicle spinning out of control and slamming into a concrete divider. Shaken and angry, but in control, Ken steadies the car and takes the next exit. He pulls over into the first car breakdown area he finds, a half-circle of concrete for auto emergencies that is situated within walking distance of a neon-bright gas station.

"Ichijouji?" Daisuke mumbles when Ken takes away the box of tailor's pins. "I'm sorry. Maybe I should drive?"

Ken rubs his eyes with one fist, squints at the first pin he withdraws, rubs his eyes again, and finally wets the pin's sharp metal tip. "No, I've got it," he says and begins securing the other man's loose shirtsleeves.

Several pins pass in and out of his mouth as he tightens up the shoulders and wrists, but on the last he pricks his tongue and tastes blood.

"Ichijouji?"

"You should have told me that you didn't own a suit," Ken says, moving on to the other problematic regions—the loose inseam, floppy collar, billowy waist. He works diligently around the occasional tremor of his hands. "Now they will think we can't afford to buy our own."

"I don't care what they think of us," Daisuke says tersely.

"They didn't invite us."

"Jun told us to come."

"We weren't _invited_," Ken stresses. "We can't walk in there and—"

"Look, do you want me to drive?"

No reply. Ken returns to the alterations.

The radio is quiet and soft, tuned to a station of exclusively classical music. The car belongs to both of them, leased in joint, even though Daisuke footed the bill and Ken drives it most of the time. Ken doesn't like having the radio turned on when he drives—he is never prone to distraction except when driving—but if it must be audible, he insists on listening to music that has no lyrics. Otherwise a catchy song will start playing on a contemporary station, he will spontaneously begin to memorize the lyrics, force of habit and all that, and then suddenly someone in front of him will slam on their brakes. By dropping a lead foot onto his own brake pedal, he has experienced too many narrow misses to not learn something. Now he leaves the tuner on 101.3 where he can identify the composer and the song with little difficulty. Sometimes he gets confused between Rebikov's _Shepherd Playing on his Pipe_ and _Evening in the Meadow_, but his thoughts don't wander so much when that mix-up happens and the disc jockeys have a courteous way of saying which song is which anyway.

Ken and Daisuke share a long look once the last pin has been slid into place along the right knee.

A new song unwinds from the crappy car speakers.

Ken, tentatively: "This song has three sharps."

"It's pretty," Daisuke replies absently.

"Do you hear that? The melody is simple_—semplice _would be the technical term. If someone had a good ear, they'd probably be able to reproduce this without ever seeing the sheet music. It starts off quietly—and—"

Daisuke blinks and tilts his head. "What was that?" he asks. "That—it went really fast."

"Those were grace notes. They're little ornamentations to remind you that the music has depth even when it seems so shallow." Ken thinks about that. "The composer once said music is 'a language of emotions,' and he wrote music 'to express moments in life for which words are no longer sufficient.'"

"Oh. Cool."

They both look away at the same time, synchronized even in their uneasiness, and Ken studies what he can see in the side-mirror while Daisuke folds his hands together and stares pointedly at the radio.

Rebikov sizzles into white noise before the next song picks up. This one might be Chopin, Ken decides—_dolce con expressivo_, a little upbeat. It reminds him of the man sitting an arm's reach away: sweet, but with expression.

Daisuke looks inquisitive and Ken remembers the song title. "Cantabile in B-Flat Major," he says. "I have this on a CD at home."

"I'd like to hear it again."

"When we get back, I'll find it for you."

"Thanks."

It isn't raining. The sky is clear, but with evening approaching they will end up driving in the dark unless they hurry back onto the highway. Ken just wants to turn off the engine, lean back in his seat, and sit here until Daisuke agrees to let them go back home. He wants to go back home and take a long shower, slip into some informal clothes, and go to bed. In the morning he has lectures to do for classes and Daisuke has work. But here they are, driving into the city, and Ken just wants to go back home.

"Jun will look beautiful," Daisuke says. "She asked me to be the ring-bearer."

"Aren't you too old for that?" Ken asks, looking sideways.

"She said that I would always be her little brother." Now pianissimo: "No matter what."

Ken fidgets and his key chains chatter brightly when he brushes two fingers against them. "I don't have to go inside with you. I can wait in the parking lot."

"I want you to come."

"They don't like me."

"Jun likes you."

"Only because I gave her that free autograph when we were kids."

Daisuke deliberately shakes his head. "She likes you. She specifically wanted you to come, too."

"Won't it cause . . . I don't know. Tension?"

"I'm not going in there without you."

"Am I simply your moral support?"

A hand sneaks over to Ken; touches his elbow. "No," Daisuke says.

Eyes closed, as if in pain: "They really don't like me."

"They really don't like me either."

White noise rolls throughout the car like thunder. It lasts longer this time and overwhelms most other noises aside from the merry dinging of a distant gasp pump and Daisuke's world-weary sighs. The highway entry ramp they need to be on _like, right now_ in order to reach the chapel by sundown snakes up and up nearby. Through the hissing crackle, Ken listens to a line of cars accelerating in order to merge.

The next song. Not too fast, starting softly, growing in volume. Four sharps. 4/4 time. _Andantino con moto_. This might be Arabesque No. 1, a solo for the piano.

"Debussy. I think this is Debussy."

". . . I think I should drive."

Ken looks at him and frowns. "You said that you long for me—that you love me." He takes the other man's hand into his own and inspects the knuckles. They are tan, rough, and scraped, the complete antithesis to the slim and unblemished fingers caressing them. Daisuke spends most of his time in the kitchen and the scars of his battles with sharp, slippery utensils are distinct. "Do you ever regret _us_ after what's happened?"

"Never."

A kiss brands the palm. "Would you have done things differently?"

Daisuke's grin is slower than usual, but it still appears. "Jun promised that her first kid would be named after me. It will piss off our parents so much."

"Why didn't you tell me sooner about attending the wedding? I thought they had been planning this for months."

"They had, but Jun and I wanted to keep it quiet to everyone until . . . well, until. I wasn't sure what the verdict would be until this morning. And I thought you had an extra suit that I could borrow."

"You're too short for my clothing," Ken says, snickering.

"I am not!"

Their banter, the way it is smooth and warm, makes Ken feel like things are going to be all right. Maybe he wants to sit in the car in the parking lot while Daisuke attends the ceremony; maybe he wants to turn around and go back home so he can dig out that Chopin CD for Daisuke; maybe he wants to die, but only so long as Daisuke is there with him for all eternity. There are a thousand maybes, a million maybes on a bad day, but he chooses not to worry about them when they talk like this. Ken teases Daisuke about his height, Daisuke calls him a child, and then in typical Daisuke fashion his tongue pokes out to mock and debase. The opportunity jumps out and Ken tackles it: he kisses Daisuke, and it feels wet, hot, sticky, suggestive, and even better than all right. He can taste the chocolate chip pancakes Daisuke made this morning. They had four apiece and Ken was about to ask for more maple syrup when Daisuke sprung the news on him about attending Jun's wedding.

It has been years since their first kiss—years since their first sexual encounter. Here they pull away slightly, not quite leaving one another, and they're blushing as if it is their first time. Somehow, it might be. Ken listens and hears a song on the radio that he cannot identify, but he doesn't care.

"We'll stay for the reception," Daisuke whispers. "If my family is feeling sympathetic, we might be able to get some slices of cake."

"You would never forsake the cake," Ken whispers back. "And I'll be with you."

Their first time had been a gradual, exploratory experience that led to a messy bunk bed for Ken and one satisfied smile for Daisuke come morning. They move closer and try to capture that special newness again, although the bothersome hand brake jabs Ken's hip when he leans over. Seatbelts whine as they come undone, retracting back into the cabin, their silver buckles gleaming in the last of precious sunlight. Ken cuts the engine and manually rolls down the windows. The breeze feels pleasant while traffic creates its own sort of background music. Daisuke smiles and Ken slips two fingers into a vulnerable space along his pin-secured dress shirt's hem . . .

But then the focus shifts—there is no more stopped car on the side of the road with the windows down and sex working inside like magic. It's morning now, early, and Jun is sitting in front of her dressing room mirror looking the part of an exuberant woman about to be wed. She is stenciling her lips, defining the boundaries of her lipstick, while her mother smiles blissfully and braids her hair. Long and red, shiny and heavy—this hair is not at all like the rough, spiky mess she sported during her rebellious teenage years of jeans and ties and blonde rockers. Her wedding dress is Western and white, a complement to her fair skin, and she _is _beautiful like Daisuke said she would be. For some reason it is hazy in the dressing room, as if a fog has settled or a smeared pane of glass is standing in front of everything.

A door opens and her mother looks up at the intruder, visibly annoyed. "What is it?"

"Jun, did you invite your brother?"

The bride purses her lips together, checking the makeup's dark outlines for evenness. "Yes, I did," she says casually. She sets down the stencil once things look okay.

A ring-bearer's pillow is sitting on the counter beside her makeup kit. Daisuke will carry it during the ceremony because that is what Jun has asked him to do. The cover is made of brocaded white silk, interwoven with shiny silver threads that shine beneath the light. The two gold rings are modest, but they represent too much emotion for the price tags to have any intrinsic importance.

"What?" her mother squawks. Those old, wrinkled hands clench and unclench in Jun's healthy hair. "You did _what_?"

"I invited my brother. And his boyfriend. I don't need your permission to arrange my own guest list."

Jun picks up a pair of hoop earrings and slips them on. They smell strongly of rubbing alcohol, recent sanitization. She had to get her ears pierced again for the wedding—the original holes from childhood had closed after years of not wearing earrings at all—and she had cried a little during the procedure. Daisuke had pestered her on the phone for an hour after he found out.

"I can't believe you—"

"Please, ladies!" intrudes the intruder. "There has been a terrible accident."

Jun's blood runs cold and the temperature in the room seems to drop. Her hand unconsciously tugs on one of the hoops; she winces because the earring holes are new and sore, and they will become infected if she isn't careful. "An accident?"

"A car accident not too far from here. The police just got to us and they're waiting in the parlor. The identification on the occupants said . . . oh, Jun, I'm so sorry . . ."

Her hands fall limply into her lap. The fingertips look too pink against her fair dress because the earring holes are bleeding now, slightly torn, but that is okay since it only takes some disinfecting medication to soothe and stopper the soreness and blood.

"They didn't make it?" Jun asks.

Her mother looks like she has just swallowed several freshly cut lemons in quick succession.

"They'll explain in more detail, but they said that the car allegedly came off of the road sometime last night and crashed. Daisuke and Ken lived far away, didn't they?"

"More than a few hours, to be away from everyone," Jun answers automatically. She takes off her bracelet—a gold tennis bracelet that Daisuke gave her on a birthday that seems far removed now—and places it next to the stencil and ring-bearer's pillow. "Because they weren't accepted here."

When she stands, her dress flares out behind her and diffuses into the air, gathering with and winding through the thickly accumulated fog. Eventually her body becomes blocked from view, lost in a milky unreality of haze and silk, until only the shimmer of her tears can be seen if you're willing to search long enough.


	3. three

_Author's Notes: Don't mind the ending—it's supposed to be that way. This is a pretty graphic chapter, so be prepared!_

Nightmares in adulthood are often associated with outside stressors or exist concurrently with another mental disorder. Ken just wishes they would stop.

* * *

**

* * *

**

Oneirophobia

**

* * *

**

**

* * *

**

**3.**

Ken feels himself coming back into being—and 'being' is a relative term—in jerks and spurts. He wiggles his fingers experimentally, relishing in the sensation after going without it; he stretches his arms, bends his legs, and blinks. All around him there is nothing but milky grayness, while he feels the heat of an intense light situated somewhere above him. He is naked and sweating profusely, sheathed in the perspiration rolling off his skin.

His palms are fascinating networks of interconnected lines, the naturally occurring creases from pre-life. Each spot has a name: heart line and marriage lines, girdles, random planet-inspired swells. An entire lifetime could be summed up on the right palm. Palmistry is something unconventional he sought out when he was a kid, a practice he could prove or debunk however he wished. A fortune-teller—a silly, fake gypsy who had set up a tent in the neighborhood carnival—told him that if you have no lifelines, you are not meant to be alive. Ken has always had two lifelines, thank you very much, but he looks at his palms anyway to ensure that they are still there.

One glance later, he discovers that his lifelines are gone. Nothing seems amiss about the hot grayness or the nakedness or the unscented sweat that lets his thighs slide together easily, but the lack of lifelines feels terribly wrong. He had them before, didn't he? Sweat glitters in the remaining creases, clean and beautiful, half-hidden within hollows created by his folded fingers.

"The human body is composed of anywhere from 50 to 80 water," someone says. "It depends on the individual."

In the grayness that runs on into infinity, Ken finds the single blemish: a black rectangle, its dimensions unmistakably that of a standard door's. Ken cannot see the knob or panels because its color is that seamlessly dark. The voice came from there. The voice is almost familiar to him, hovering at the brink of unmemory as if it belongs to a time that has long since passed. An intimate anachronism.

"Water is a universal solvent," Ken says and floats toward the voice.

"Why is it critical to all organisms?"

He stops in front of the door. "It forms hydrogen bonds," he says. His fingers, dripping warm sweat, nervously comb the hair plastered against his neck. Something indescribable prevents him from going inside the blackness to confront the voice. "It has two lone pairs—"

"Unlike what other compound?"

"Ammonia. That has only one lone pair, which makes all the difference."

"Continue," the voice says, conceding speech as a teacher might to his willing pupil.

Ken remembers Tamachi, a school that shouldn't exist here but does anyway, and his mind shivers before his body has a chance to. "The other reason it is critical—its high polarity."

"Describe that in greater detail."

"High polarity is responsible for making water such a good solvent," Ken says without hesitation. The information simply comes to him; the words pour from his mouth, taken almost verbatim from a textbook he simultaneously sees being written in his mind's eye. The words crawl across each blank page like an army of ants. He delights in the simplicity of his answers. "There are nonpolar substances like fats that cannot dissolve in water. But in ionic solutes—for example, those containing table salt—"

"Chemical formula?"

"NaCl. The ions that form ionic solutes are easily taken away from their crystalline lattice and discharged into the solution. Water's partially negative charges are attracted to any of the positively charged components in the solute—"

"That's enough," the teacher snaps.

Ken immediately stops talking. He catches the flicker of something shifting in the darkness, a ripple of black against black, and he squints into infinity.

_I have perfect vision_, he thinks without meaning to.

He has perfect vision, even after decades of abusing his eyes on another plane of existence called "reality." Then, with increasing consequential lucidity, he understands that he is thirteen years old and his nakedness is the ultimate vulnerability.

"You're missing one important thing." The teacher steps through the doorway, metamorphosing from shadows into something solid and definite. He smiles at Ken, almost kindly, but his eyes are crueler than an early winter. "I doubt you'll figure it out on your own."

Recognition pulls at Ken slowly but surely, just as everything else has; soon, with increasing fear now, he identifies the teacher and stumbles backward as part of a poorly coordinated retreat. The teacher looks like him—_is him!­­—_which elucidates the mystery of the voice's familiarity and the reason for its displacement in time. Unlike Ken, the teacher shirks nakedness in favor of wearing a plain blue jumpsuit with fancy gold snaps and latches along its front. Their hairstyles are drastically different, too: for Ken, limp and dark and long; for the teacher, wild and eccentric and aesthetically pleasing in its spiked chaos.

"What? What is the most important thing?"

"Water is also essential in making coffee," the Kaiser says.

"I hate coffee," Ken says petulantly and decides to run away.

But suddenly they are standing in a coffee shop, one of those modern clubs with an Internet connection and many patrons who hope they look trendy just by being there. However, instead of pretentious humans, furry burros personified sit at the computer terminals or read crappy poetry from squat, compact books. One burro wearing a black beret uses a stalk of milkweed to stir his cappuccino. Fresh hay is strewn out all over the floor and occasionally a burro reaches down for a tasty handful. Fresh dung rests untouched beneath every stool. The room smells like a barnyard.

Grimacing at first, the Kaiser removes his signature glasses—gold frames and purple lenses that the burros would be sure to consider attractively retro—and then snaps the wide nosepiece underfoot. The sound is loud and definite, even frightening, and Ken flinches.

They walk together past the line of stools to a small, quiet booth in the corner. One of the walls is a window that looks out onto a nameless metropolis that Ken doesn't know the name of. When he sits down, he realizes he is still naked, but he doesn't care and no one else seems to either. No one notices the Kaiser unzipping his jumpsuit, peeling the sleeves off of his arms, and pushing the upper part of the outfit down to his waist. No one notices Ken crying or how the Kaiser's wrists have holes in them that mimic the factually accurate Crucifixion.

The Kaiser looks at the menu hanging on an adjacent wall. "What do you want?"

"What are you doing here?" Ken asks, dismayed. He is more worried about the foreign setting than the pack animals drinking out of dinky little cups. He is more worried about the Kaiser's presence than the way his own ass slips comfortably into the seat because the skin is so slick with sweat.

With his hands folded together and his chin propped atop them, the Kaiser leans forward and regards Ken. Blood that is the correct color drips down his forearms; fat globules of it leave streaks like rain down glass. He smiles. His teeth are fashioned from razorblades.

"I'm setting up shop," the Kasier says, clicking his metal teeth. He exudes nonchalance. "I'm visiting it personally with you for the sake of appearances."

The Kaiser twists one wrist and snaps his fingers, and soon a waiter that looks more human than the burros do rushes over to take the order. The waiter has a telling gold collar around his neck, and Ken doesn't feel much surprise, at least when compared to his other shocks, to see that the waiter is Daisuke—albeit a battered and broken and willpower-less incarnation of him.

"How may I help you?" Daisuke whispers. He appears to be more human than the patrons, but his eyes and nose are bovine and he has a pair of long, floppy brown ears.

"Coffee. Black. Add anything and you die," the Kaiser says. "My associate here will have the _Hippobosca equina _Super-Saver Special with some whipped cream on top. Actually—bring the whipped cream separately."

Daisuke carefully scratches the order into own skin with a painful-looking etching tool, right alongside a number of other orders for "black coffee" and the occasional "orange scone." Once finished, a burro calls Daisuke over and Ken watches the hairier patron complain about his drink in a mixture of human words and grunting noises.

"What do you mean by 'setting up shop'?" Ken asks eventually.

"I think that is fairly obvious."

"No," Ken says, deadpan, "it isn't. Tell me."

The Kaiser sighs. "Have you been getting any headaches lately?"

Across from them, Daisuke goes into the kitchen and fetches a small butterfly net with an extra-long handle. The net's gossamer fibers twinkle as he swings it through the air, hoping to catch the horseflies that congregate in seething clusters over every burro. He hops a few times, traps an especially large number of flies, and then deposits them into the opaque jar he holds in his other hand. It looks like a smooth operation to the outside observer.

"Sometimes," Ken says. "I get headaches sometimes. Lately."

"At the base of your neck? Does it spread upward from there until you have to sit and put your head between your knees so it will stop hurting as much?"

"Isn't . . . Isn't that where the Dark Seed is?"

"Ah—here's our order!"

Daisuke carries over a tray and places it on a collapsible stand. Black coffee he sets by the Kaiser, while Ken receives a fancy glass cup with a beveled top. The glass is clear and he can see the horseflies inside of it, buzzing angrily from their confinement, desiring blood. A rotten strawberry rests at the bottom with the few flies that do not bother to protest.

"_Hippobosca equina_," Ken says, growing pale. "I get it now. The scientific name for horseflies."

"It didn't cost all that much, too." The Kaiser sips his drink. Daisuke leaves the requested can of whipped cream and hovers nearby, always courteous, until the Kaiser waves him off. Nothing has been added to the coffee and unnecessary carnage always ruins his appetite for caffeine.

Ken frowns. "But the headaches—and the Dark Seed—"

"If this has never occurred to you before, you have been wasting the intelligence I cultivated."

"The Seed—is it becoming active?"

The Kaiser touches one forefinger to his nose, grins, and takes another sip. "Eat your Super-Saver Special, Ken. It's good for you. High in protein."

"You want to take over my body again?" Ken exclaims before he even knows what he's saying. Here comes the panic, the pain, the fear. "Is that what 'setting up shop' means? But you're me! You _can't_ . . ."

"I am you, sure. I am that little part of you that you refuse to acknowledge as ever having existed in the first place," the Kaiser says conversationally. "You are only half the person you used to be."

"My doctor said—"

"Your doctor doesn't understand what is happening because you never really told him the whole story. You _enjoyed _being me. I wouldn't have stuck around if you didn't."

"But I take colloidal mineral supplements!"

The Kaiser nods. "And a cocktail of antipsychotic drugs. I know. I know everything that you know, and then some."

Ken's eyes move aside to seek out Daisuke. It is a reflex.

"Yes, I even know how delicious the back of his right thigh tastes."

"This can't be happening! I've been diagnosed with Bipolar I disorder!" Ken exclaims desperately.

"And paraphrenic schizophrenia, right?" the Kaiser asks, batting his eyelashes. "I remember the day you heard that news. You were frightened and relieved because you finally thought the Kaiser could be explained away by chemical imbalances and other theories of modern medical science.

"But you don't feel any different, any saner, do you? Sometimes you cannot help yourself: you look at Daisuke and you remember how he crushed the dreams you had for the Digital World. You go and hide in your room, pop pills, watch the world spin, and hope you'll get better. You try to squash what you feel, but it comes back within a day. It always does."

"Your words do echo inside me, even now . . . but that does not mean I want to be like you again!" Ken's voice goes jagged with pain. "_I'm happy!_"

"Sorry, but that is a lie. You are sick, but you aren't the kind of sick that professional attention can help." The Kaiser reaches over and picks up the can of whipped cream, but he pauses and frowns when he notices the untouched Super-Saver Special. "I didn't pay for that so you could look at it."

"I hate you," Ken says. His hands clench. "I hate you. I hate you so much."

"That is a wasted effort," the Kaiser says, scooting away his coffee and popping off the can's top in one fluid motion. He smiles and opens his mouth, pushes the nozzle, and welcomes a helping of vanilla fluff. "But if it is any consolation, I hate you too."

"You'll never take my body back. Even if you somehow manage to, Daisuke and the others will—"

"They are tired of you. Daisuke is especially tired of you. I'm the objective party here, okay? You have your own best interests in mind when you talk. You don't truly see how he agonizes whenever he is with you."

"He loves me," Ken says, but now he doesn't sound so sure. Something about a cemetery flashes into his mind, an old snapshot of gray rain and cold dirt, but his mind cannot process what that means and thus banishes it. "And I love him back. So he'll help me."

"If you look hard, you will see what I'm talking about. But I want you to know that I'm here for you. I'm here and waiting for you." The Kaiser grins wolfishly. The metal teeth cut into his tongue when he licks his lips clean. "I am the strength you don't want to admit you have. You need me, or else you will break into a million pieces."

Something hot twinges Ken's belly. His eyes, which had been progressively becoming narrower the longer the Kaiser spoke, widen again. _That_ heat is a familiar sensation. Soon that heat will intensify, advancing into a fire that cannot be ignored; it will spread through his lower body, gather in his loins, and make his knees melt into gelatin. It will be more real than he wants it to be. It will demand relief—something to quench its flames. Discreetly, Ken folds his wet legs, but the Kaiser knows. He knows _everything_.

"You look in the mirror sometimes, right after a shower, and you spike up your hair," the Kaiser says. He tousles his already-messy, impossibly buoyant hair. "It isn't the same thing, but you're too afraid to try out Motomiya's styling gel. The Digital World helped you get that style before, and you're curious to see if you can replicate it in what you like to call 'real life.'"

"That is not true," Ken whispers, trembling. "That is not true!"

"But it is. And every time you encounter leather, you think of me. Your wallet is made of genuine leather and you like to smell it—you bury your nose in the folds, into that one nook above your credit cards, and just _breathe_."

"Stop telling me these lies!"

"I have watched you do these things. It's flattering, in a strange way."

"You're absolutely insane!"

"Ken," the Kaiser says, and suddenly he possesses great gravitas in spite of his semi-nakedness and the whipped cream on his chin. "Listen to me, okay? I want you to know that I'll wait forever for you. Daisuke is going to hurt you like he hurt me, but it is will be a lot worse because you feel actual drippy emotion for that fool. Just know that you can come back to me. I hate you, but we share a body, and I don't want you to do something stupid like flay your wrists and ruin whatever dreams we might still be able to achieve."

A mixture of blood and sweat from the Kaiser's pierced wrists and Ken's sopping body now covers the surface of the table. Glaring, Ken plants his palms in the sticky liquid and stands up. His groin is burning up with want, but he risks exposing it so he can run away for real. He does not want to be here any more.

"I'm done with this. I'm done with you. You will never succeed with such a stupid idea," Ken says darkly.

Although he is a nonsuperimposable image of untidy hair and jumpsuit bottoms and radiant evil, the Kaiser stands up and places his hands into the liquid as well. He leans in close, reaching up to cup Ken's cheek with a dirtied hand. A thumb presses into the soft, fleshy hollow alongside the jaw, studying the stress there, and Ken is overcome with the untimely and unwished-for immobility of nightmares.

"Try saying those exact words the next time you get what you'd like to believe is a tension headache," the Kaiser whispers. His tongue slithers out, striped red and pink from the steep number of cuts it underwent due to his teeth. He pulls Ken against him and licks the half-open mouth, leaving a smear of blood and saliva. "Honor me the next time you touch yourself."

Ken cannot do anything to resist. His heart accelerates, his hands start to shake, something twists inside his chest, his intestines become a knot of pain, and the strength goes out of his knees like he had anticipated. The Kaiser is on top of him in an instant, staining his jumpsuit in the table's muck, blood trailing from wrists and tongue. His greedy and dirty hands coast over the skin covered in so much clean condensation. _Conquest._ The Kaiser laughs in his ear. This is conquest. The violating hands glide down, down, down; they glide down his chest and across his stomach and around his hips and then——


	4. four

_Author's Notes: Sorry for being so late with this. My sleep schedule is weird right now._

Nightmares in adulthood are often associated with outside stressors or exist concurrently with another mental disorder. Ken just wishes they would stop.

* * *

**

* * *

**

Oneirophobia

**

* * *

**

**

* * *

**

**4.**

_Where are you? I can't find you._

Ken wakes up and realizes that he has an erection. It is the most demanding erection he has ever had in his life.

The bedroom is dim and muggy. The sheets are tangled around his legs and his chest is bare. He blinks. The ceiling fan above him spins lazily, at times disrupting the thin band of light that emanates from a bathroom door left ajar. On one wall there is a window with shut Venetian blinds, which are old, yellow, dusty, and beginning to flake. He can hear a city beyond them, already steeped in the motions of daytime: cars fighting the gridlock, people yelling at one another, doors opening and slamming in tandem, the cacophonous crunch of trash cans as they're emptied into dumpsters the next alley over. That is the world outside—separated from him by a few feet of brick and plaster and glass. His mind is strangely blank.

He lifts his right palm and looks at it, squinting through the dimness. The all-important lifeline is there as it should be, but then he feels confused because he isn't sure which crease the lifeline belongs to. But it doesn't matter.

"A dream," he says thickly into that same moist palm drawn near. "It was just a dream."

The dream slips off of him like sweat and he sits up to greet awareness. He is naked and his lips are chapped; he licks them to mellow the rough edges a little and wonders where he is. This is his bedroom. He knows that he shares it with someone else. With his mind still blank, he feels peaceful despite the urgent and dark emotion that tickles his epiglottis and evades swallowing. Someone moves past the bathroom's doorway, blocking out the light temporarily. The ceiling fan spins onward and the city outside seems no less loud.

Now he can smell cologne: light, alluring, romantic, and maybe spicy. A week ago he had a dream about a special evening out, maybe for an important anniversary, forever catalogued in his mind by that scent. But dreams aren't real, of course, and his dreamt evening out will probably never reach reality—because they don't ever have evenings out together, because the scent-wearer he shares his bedroom with is too busy for sentimental things, because Ken spends dinner each night eating ramen and watching television for mind-numbing hours on end. Dreams are wonderful, though . . .

Suddenly his hand slides beneath the twisted sheets without approval, obeying an instinct buried too deeply to be neutralized. His hand doesn't stop for addled thoughts and continues on, flicking chipped fingernails over the navel and then finally cupping around his hot urgency with the familiarity of an old friend. He leans back down and services himself—as simple as that, like pouring milk into cereal—and then lies there in the mugginess. The sheets are wet and disgusting now, but he finally feels satisfied.

The bathroom door opens and steam rolls out in a stifling wave. A man rushes out as well, toweling his hair vigorously, because he needs to leave as soon as possible. He is important and he has appointments to keep. The damp towel flops onto the bed and he picks up a belt from the dresser, slides it through the loops of his pants, and buckles it tightly. He looks fit and trim, and Ken receives a delicious half-second view of the man's flat, bronzed stomach before a silky black shirt is tugged into place over it.

"Daisuke," Ken mumbles. That is the man's name. It is the only name Ken has ever considered significant. "Daisuke?"

"Have you seen my watch?" Daisuke asks as he straightens his shirt and does up the opal buttons. His voice is brisk and pertinent. "I lent it to you yesterday because you had that job interview."

The watch? Ken tries to think through his spent grogginess. The watch—the one made of burnished silver that twinkles in the sunlight. Yesterday he couldn't stop looking at it. He wore it on his left wrist and kept checking the time while on the subway that went across town, hoping he looked as important as Daisuke did even though he was dressed in plain cotton instead of silk. (Daisuke let him borrow the watch, but resistance met additional entreaties to borrow a silk shirt. Ken had already ruined enough good shirts accidentally.)

He loved that watch. Its qualities reflected the exorbitant price: scratch resistant mineral crystal face, thick and authoritative-looking strap, water-resistant case. It had an analog timepiece, but for the sake of pointless luxury it also had a digital clock, alarm, stopwatch, and calendar. The latter functions Daisuke forbade Ken from toying with, but Ken poked at the buttons anyway. _Motomiya can change the settings back anyway_, he said to his conscience._ Don't worry about it._

He got lost after returning to the surface streets and ended up being late to the job interview. Stern Mr. R— sitting behind the desk checked his own watch when Ken ambled in. Just as Ken opened his mouth to speak, Mr. R— frowned and dismissed him without even hearing an excuse or apology. Ken stood frozen in the doorway, unable to believe he had not been given a chance to make amends, and a pretty young intern had to gently guide him out by the arm. Her hands were soft and cool, the first pair of hands he had felt in a while, and he ached for Daisuke. In the foyer she pointed out his watch and said—no joke—that its aesthetic features meshed well with his own. Ken looked at her blankly and she blushed.

"It isn't mine," he said weakly. "It belongs to a friend."

The job interview was something he had been looking forward to, and he fucked up completely by being late! He couldn't keep even this one simple appointment that Daisuke had gone to all the trouble of arranging for him. Too late he realized he should have brought a map like Motomiya had said to.

"I'm sorry—it's just—" She was flustered judging by how fiercely she chewed on a fake nail. "You look so familiar. Do I know you?"

"I'm friends with Motomiya Daisuke," he said. The man's face flashed into his mind, the tilted lips forming words: _Don't tell anyone about our private life, Ichijouji._ After that there came a series of the private things: rushed sex and unrequited adulation and lonely nights and comfort food and . . .

"Motomiya Daisuke-_sensei­_?" the intern exclaimed through her teeth. "That famous scientist who figured out a cure for the common cold? He's a genius!"

"He really is," Ken agreed. It was true. He was used to reactions like this, and he tried to smile. "We're friends. Sometimes I'm in the background when he makes an announcement, so you might've seen me there. And sometimes we go out together. We've been to this office building . . . but I can't say I remember you . . ."

The intern gasped again. "In that case, you have to get Motomiya Daisuke-sensei to come back here so you can introduce me to him. I can't believe you know him!"

"KEN! Are you listening to me?"

As if doused with ice water, Ken snaps out of the memory and his eyes land on the angry face looking down at him from the bedside. He winces. This is Motomiya Daisuke, Motomiya Daisuke-_sensei _to be specific, the scent-wearing man who has been asking about the watch while juggling the task of finding his wallet, money, and car keys. Daisuke is famous. Daisuke is a genius. Daisuke wants the watch, he wants it now, and he just said something about irresponsibility and how much he is disappointed in Ken.

"I have a meeting with the board of trustees," Daisuke hisses. Daisuke is a famous, genius pathologist who works at the local university and has discovered the key that opens nature's lockbox of secrets. He has much more left to discover; he doesn't have time to deal with his lethargic, forgetful boyfriend. "Why do you always do this to me? I told you to set that watch on the dresser when you were done with it."

"I would've if I could've," Ken says quietly.

Brief, beautiful confusion enters Daisuke's expression. "What do you mean?"

It was an accident. Ken returned home from the botched job interview, and since the house stayed empty and he felt so sorry for himself, he went into the kitchen to make a gluttonous late lunch. The watch was precious, he knew that, so he took it off and set it beside the chopping board while he prepared some handmade pasta. It was an accident—_he swore it­­—_because he had just set the water on boil when he turned around with the strainer, misjudged his distance from the counter, and knocked the watch into the sink. It spun around the chrome bottom once in an ellipse-shaped path, making a frightful noise of metal against metal, and then plunked into the disposal. Ken didn't react in time to catch it.

"That makes no sense at all," Daisuke says. "The watchband would've caught on the rubber flaps that cover the disposal."

"The watch is made of a heavier metal," Ken protests, sitting up in bed with the sticky sheets still wrapped around him like a shroud. "It is heavy enough to go past. I saw it happen!"

"So what did you do after that, then?" Daisuke growls. His eyes are burning. "Did you just leave it down there?"

"I didn't know what to do. I didn't want to damage it."

"Why did you decide to tell me this when—oh, I don't know—_I need to get to a meeting that is in less than forty minutes?_"

"You came in late last night!" Ken can't believe this: last night he had waited as long as he could, but he wasn't a night owl like Daisuke and he didn't think running coffee through his veins was a very healthy thing to do. "I was already asleep. You could have woken me up if you didn't see your watch on the dresser."

Daisuke presses his lips together. "I didn't come home last night at all, actually. I stayed at the labs, _working_, and just came home to get a shower and a change of clothes. But you could have called me when it happened, you know."

"You never answer your cell phone if my name is on the caller ID," Ken grumbles.

"Come on," Daisuke says impatiently. "I don't have time for verbal sparring. Did the watch really fall into the disposal?"

"Yes."

"I will take apart the trap when I get home tonight."

"I'm not going to wait up for you."

"Ken, I really do not care what you're going to do. I do not want to deal with all of this bullshit right now. Keep the drain clean for today and prevent your imbecility from turning on the disposal. 'Imbecility' is—"

"I know what that word means," Ken says icily. "And do you really think I'd do something like that? Thanks for your vote of confidence."

Daisuke makes a noise somewhere between a growl and an exasperated groan. "The watch isn't the only thing I'm angry about right now. I keep telling you—over and over again—to wear underwear to bed. I will no longer pay to wash the sheets almost every morning because you like to sleep in the nude and are too lazy to get up to take care of a hard-on."

Ken looks at his lap and the grimy sheets that are tangled over it. This wasn't his fault. He woke up like that and Daisuke was in the bathroom! He couldn't have taken care of it properly when it became unbearable. His hand moved by itself. Instinct is a powerful thing—and—and—

Incriminating color bleeds onto his cheeks and he feels _ashamed _even though he shouldn't. He feels dirty and wrong, like he is no better than the stains Daisuke is grousing about, and he wants that feeling to go away.

"I can make some breakfast for us," Ken says desperately. "It won't take very long."

There is no reply. Daisuke pretends he is alone, a common reaction of his whenever he is pissed off, and the remainder of his morning at home is prompt and unaffected. He walks down the hallway, pads through the kitchen, and opens three cabinets before he finds a box of gritty energy bars. The box makes a vicious noise when he tears it open and empties it out into his backpack. Seconds later he toys with the volume profile for his cell phone, slips on his shoes and stamps them to ensure the heels are snug, and then slams the front door behind him when he leaves.

"I feel dirty," Ken says to no one in particular. "_I'm _dirty. I'm very dirty. Is that what you want to hear, Motomiya?"

He peels off the sheets, rolls them up, and stuffs them into a whicker hamper he intends to take down to the self-service laundry no matter how tetchy Daisuke seems to be about it. In an irrational moment of defiance, he throws open the wardrobe and purposelessly selects one of Daisuke's better shirts. He models it in the bathroom mirror, admiring the dark blue satin and the gold cufflinks, and then goes on to slide into a regular pair of pajama pants. He feels sticky and disgusting, and yet refreshed.

Breakfast is a quiet, lonely affair that Ken makes less unbearable by cooking from scratch anything he has the ingredients for. Plates of French toast, carrot coconut bread, poached eggs with tomatoes, stacks upon stacks of oatmeal pancakes—he makes enough food for a family of four and then some, furiously stirring and kneading and sifting for hours to ensure that he won't actually _think_. Recipes are like mathematical equations in that they do not favor emotion no matter how open they are to interpretation and creativity. He devotes himself to them, their prescribed measurements and caveats and helpful hints, and his mind goes pleasantly numb. When he reaches over to the spice rack to get some cinnamon, he remembers that he ran out of it yesterday during a similar cooking spree; he abruptly starts sobbing, doesn't know how to stop when the novelty of tears wears off, and finishes cooking his feast with the saline dripping fast and hot off his chin.

He lays down two placemats on the table, then two knives and two forks and two spoons and two napkins, and brings over each dish with the modesty of a world-class chef. Most of it he doesn't touch because most of it Daisuke loves, but he has a slice of carrot coconut bread and ends up crying harder when he tastes too much bitterness. (He must have measured out an excess of baking soda, although the taste doesn't matter anyway when wave after wave of nausea stops by for a visit and they go on to tour the bathroom together.)

The early afternoon is spent storing the leftovers for more quiet, lonely meals. The refrigerator is already packed with plastic containers that hold the untouched breakfasts of the past. He leaves out the bread in case he later feels better about eating, tucks the tableware he used into the dishwasher, and wipes down the counters. Afterward he dries his hands on the expensive silk shirttails, pauses when the wet cloth grows hot from friction, and then decides he doesn't care at all about what happens to Daisuke's precious clothes. The shirt is ruined anyway: it is powered with flour, blotted by egg yolk, flecked in various-colored spices. Before today he would have panicked and pressed a moist paper towel to the tomato juice stains, the sausage grease streaks, the drying butter smears; he would have cried over this, worried about this, suffered from this. But today he can't seem to muster up the anxiety to do anything like that.

His cell phone mocks him for the remainder of the day. He calls Daisuke once every hour, gets the impersonal voice mail system, and leaves a meek message each time that he knows Daisuke will delete straightaway. While not on the cell phone, he keeps it within view as he flips through recipe books, analyzes their lists of ingredients, and tries to understand why this chef used whole cloves and that chef used ground cloves when they both made the same sort of dish.

Daisuke disapproves of Ken's cooking ability because he wants Ken to land a steady job that does not depend on a particular skill—especially one judged subjectively—that might make or break a life story.

"Maybe you could be an office assistant," Daisuke said one night a long time ago. He had come home for dinner, which nowadays is unheard of. "I'm sure I could find some places willing to hire you."

"I'll be the guy who makes copies, orders highlighters, and is in charge of limiting the number of custom pens that my fellow employees swipe. Having the company's logo stamped on the outside really jacks up the price of pens, you know?" Ken rested his elbows on the table, folded both hands beneath his chin with the fork held between them, and stared unwaveringly at Daisuke. "No thanks, Motomiya."

"That is a respectable position to have."

"You're not my mother," Ken muttered, "so don't even try to tell me what is and what is not respectable."

"Okay, then I'll drop the pretenses just for you," Daisuke said, stabbing at his food. "A job like that will be something for you to _do_. Without it, you're going to mope around here and watch television and waste our cell phone minutes by calling my voice-mail fifty times a day."

Ken felt an embarrassed heat creep up the back of his neck. "I don't call your voice-mail fifty times a day! And even if I did, I wouldn't have to call so many times if you'd simply pick up your phone. Still, I spend plenty of time trying out recipes—"

"For a career that isn't worth it." The other man sighed. "You're going nowhere fast."

"Go to hell, Motomiya!"

Daisuke smiled grimly, picked up his plate, and left to dine in the living room; meanwhile, Ken lost his appetite, slammed a few kitchen cabinet doors, and stewed in his anger until he took an ice water shower to calm down.

Now Ken wonders about the "steady job" proposition as he lays his cheek against the cold paper of an open recipe book. The interview yesterday was a failure from start to finish, and soon Daisuke will learn about that failure—and then what? They don't need the money because Daisuke makes enough to support more than twice their current lifestyle. Maybe the voice-mails are excessive, but Ken is sure he hasn't called more than ten times in one day, ever. And really, it is unfair to call him selfish and obsessive and useless.

He sighs and looks at the printed ingredients closest to his nose; all he can make out is FIVE (5) EGGS halfway down the page. He knows the recipe by heart, however: FIVE (5) EGGS, ONE-AND-ONE-HALF (1.5) LITERS FLOUR, FIFTEEN (15) MILLILITERS SALT, . . . PREHEAT OVER TO TWO HUNDRED FOUR (204) DEGREES CELCIUS, . . . BAKE LOAVES ON MIDDLE RACK OF OVEN, . . .

"Voila," he whispers once the recipe is stowed away again in his mind. "Two loaves of challah bread."

His memory is normally dreadful. Birthdays and anniversaries are largely forgettable, so he has a reputation for looking at the calendar, discovering that it is some important day or another, and then rushing about in a blind panic to get things done at the last minute. _Daisuke is one year older again? Didn't he just have a birthday?_ The cards seem cheesy and thoughtless, the flowers wilt and blacken like burnt paper, and the celebratory meals turn into messes that might have tasted better if cooked with more love and less anxiety. Daisuke can taste those frightened tears in the food, but he doesn't know what to call the heavy flavor and determines that it is something like monosodium glutamate.

But there is one exception to Ken's poor memory: recipes. He can rattle off lists of ingredients and directions like a mathematician can equations and proofs. He even knows some of the chemical equations behind certain flavors, with table salt—NaCl—being easiest to recall. (With his head lying there, he thinks about table salt and its equation, and sees this queer vision of dark hair, dark eyes, water, blood, and a dreamlike fog . . . but then it clears up and he is alone again.)

Daisuke cannot fathom why Ken is capable of remembering recipes instead of practical things like dates and times; Ken offers no explanation either, but he knows that he only remembers what he is passionate about. He wants to remember everything, sure—who wouldn't want to remember some of the really important things, like birthdays? But he doesn't, because deep down beneath sentient concerns, in the dark jungle of the unconscious, there survives his passion for cooking, his love for Daisuke that knows no time but eternity, and little else.

Cooking is his gift. He will not smother it, no matter what Daisuke wants.

Without moving his head, he gropes across the table for his cell phone, unlocks the keypad, adjusts the volume, and then places it on the book right next to his mouth. It obscures EGGS with its glowing screen. He doesn't need to look to dial the number.

Twenty seconds later Daisuke's voice-mail picks up: a clipped voice says that a message can be left for Motomiya-_sensei_, but it ought to be short. Ken starts off his message with a wet sigh, one that Daisuke has come to identify instantly.

"Is there nothing I can do?" Ken asks the phone, pretending that Daisuke is there. "I'm trying. I'm really trying. I want to make you happy, but I want to make myself happy too.

"You don't come home anymore. You never answered your phone before, but you always used to manage to call me back sometime during the day—even if the call only lasted a few seconds because you were between meetings or lectures or something. I wonder if you can hear me calling. Do you just leave the cell phone off because no one other than me calls you at that number? The school gave you a pager and you use that a lot, but you refuse to tell me its number so I won't be tempted to call it. Good move on your part.

"I don't know what to say. Maybe I should say something like 'I miss you' or 'What happened to us?' . . . but those are worthless things that have no real response. I'm not as articulate as you. What do you call sayings like 'Cleanliness is next to Godliness'? Pati—platit—they're all I have for you now. I feel like I should know what that word is, but I don't.

"There are some things I can't give you. You have to know that. I want you to know that. I also want you to know that I never left for the job interview, I broke your watch on purpose, and I think about someone else when I masturbate." These things were not truths, but that did not matter since they were at least confident lies. "I just wanted you to know. I'm hanging up now."

Five seconds after roughly shoving away the cell phone, two seconds after hearing it slide off the table and dully hit the floor, one second after shutting his eyes again, Ken decides that the message he left was the worst thing he could have done. He derives no satisfaction from doing that; he experiences no liberating feelings, no great awakenings. He cannot escape himself.

With a dark and shuttered mind, he wills sleep to come back. The recipe book feels comfortable enough and acts as a surrogate pillow.

He dreams, but then again, he isn't really dreaming. It takes skill to dream about having a dream. Doesn't it?


	5. five

_Author's Notes: The first week of this semester destroyed me. Sorry for the delay._

_You will enjoy this chapter a lot more if you read Ernest Hemingway's _Hills Like White Elephants _beforehand. I promise._

Nightmares in adulthood are often associated with outside stressors or exist concurrently with another mental disorder. Ken just wishes they would stop.

* * *

**

* * *

**

Oneirophobia

**

* * *

**

**

* * *

**

**5.**

He is so tired, but he cannot let himself go to sleep.

He is rapidly learning a technique that so many other students in the past have acquired: resting the mind, but remaining aware. It is quiet in here and smells of nervous sweat and chalk dust. Someone coughs, drums a pencil against the desk, and sighs; the teacher talks on, pausing only to ask questions and designate an answerer. Ken must remain aware in case his name is chosen from the roll sheet, but his head tips too far back anyway and he is almost lost to oblivion. Luckily, the fluorescent lights above him provide little chance for the darkness he needs to sleep.

This is not college. This is not even the fancy preparatory school he battled tooth and nail to get into when he was a teenager. He looks through his eyelashes at the ceiling tiles made from plaster and paper, the modern kind interrupted by aluminum slats that form boxes of indeterminate function, and knows where he is. He is sitting in a normal classroom of rudimentary Tamachi—the exceptional depot for gifted students, the primary school that attempted to mold and shape him in its own image.

Literature class, isn't it? Posters on the wall concerned with breakthrough and obedience, lists upon lists of required reading for the term, many pencil sharpeners, mindless students who only say what the teacher wants to hear. The teacher is a stereotypical curmudgeon with a narrow mind and narrower tweed patches on his jacket's elbows. The class is reading Ernest Hemingway's _Hills Like White Elephants_. ("Reading" is a euphemism here: the students are ripping apart the story by making too many trite remarks they hope sound intelligent.)

Ken does not care about the story's bead curtain and uncommunicative American man. He is tired and he has more important things to think about. The students around him are tense and troubled and hold their breaths whenever the teacher runs one knobbly finger down the roll sheet, but Ken is too close to blissful sleep to worry about that.

_Ten _days ago he was still the ruler of the Digital World. Ten days ago he was still the famous runaway genius. Ten days ago he might have left the country according to flaky accounts from witnesses at a train station outside of the city, although at the reported time he was actually monitoring Chimeramon's progress in an entirely different world. Meanwhile, his parents were busy scheduling another press conference to plea for their son's return. _Please act rationally, Ken-chan. Everyone misses you. We love you so much!_

His shoulders ache because he is slumped down in his seat in an attempt to unravel the significant clump of stress that has accumulated in his lower back. As his head lolls to the side, his eyes finally shut and he finds a niche in the not-quite-darkness.

_Nine _days ago the Chosen Children came for him in what was to become known as the final showdown. Nine days ago they liberated him from his own insanity, he lost Wormmon, and he wandered around in the desert for what seemed like an etenrity before he made it back to the real world. Nine days ago his mother screamed when she opened the front door to find him standing there, confused tears running down his cheeks, his hair a sandy mess, and his signature Tamachi uniform torn and tattered and travel-stained. While away he had missed the ending of the previous school year, the entire summer, and now part of this new semester. Nine days ago there was no time to think about school, however, because he collapsed into a faint in his mother's arms.

Even though he felt better a few days later, his parents didn't want him to return to school until he was completely certain of himself. In truth, he never wanted to go back. His parents reached a compromise with the school in his stead: the school would allow him to waive the time he missed last term if he started within three days of their negotiations. And so he did. This is his first day back and he is so tired, but he cannot let himself go to sleep because he might be called upon to answer some vacuous question about Hemingway's story. This is Tamachi, a private school where the administration cares about the parents' money and little else; this is a luxurious educational institution where the students carry briefcases because backpacks aren't professional enough. Ken forgot his briefcase today, and basically anything else he should have brought except for one plain ballpoint pen. He wants to sleep, but he can't. He looks at the white ceiling tiles and bright lights through his eyelashes.

". . . so there is a certain lack of human responsiveness in the bar's patrons," the teacher is saying. He looks across the classroom, observing every student and determining which aren't paying attention or are paying too much attention. A list of names compiles for later use. "Similarly, the host of the bar doesn't display overt hospitality."

The story is familiar to Ken because he—as the Kaiser—had read it once. Beyond that familiarity, he doesn't recall anything specific about the story. In fact, he has begun to notice many gaping holes in his mind where information and even memories have been lost, and these holes disturb him. _Hills Like White Elephants _hangs on the edge of one hole, hazy and dim like a dream, but of no more relevance to him than something unlearned. He stopped trying to remember anything more than the story's basic plot when the struggle for further details gave him a tension headache. There are bead curtains and the American man's communication problems, Jig and her continual questions, the couple's hopes and the denial of those hopes . . . but Ken cannot remember the story having any deeper meanings. It is five flimsy pages out of his Literature textbook, another necessary item else he has forgotten at home, and thinking about those pages for too long causes real pain.

At least Ken kept these scraps of history: Hemingway died in Ketchum, Idaho, United States, after a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head. No one ever talks about his suicide, about whether or not his method was practical, and Ken doesn't have the energy to figure out the price of razorblades or the availability of cleaning solvents in that decade. Alternatively people talk about the mundane: in 1927 when Hemingway wrote this short story, he was already famous because of 1926's The Sun Also Rises, which had inaugurated him as a literary force. _That _knowledge is there without explanation, distant from the gaping holes, but he cannot remember anything about goddamn _Hills Like White Elephants _beyond its publication date and a sketchy outline.

"Ichijouji-san," the teacher says.

Ken immediately forces his neck straight. He masks a wince with a big smile and privately listens to his cervical vertebrae crackle like dry tinder. His eyes are gummy. Beneath the desk his hands are clasped together, sweaty and pale, not yet trembling.

The teacher appears unfazed. "Ichijouji-san, have you forgotten that you must stand when I call on you?"

Awkwardly, Ken scoots his chair back and stands. He remembers this part of the question-answer process. He hates this part. He is a fresh slab of meat for his classmates to salivate over; he stands there so that they might finally look more intelligent than the resident genius should he screw up in front of them. If he proves that he is not perfect, they will be overjoyed and the Tokyo stock market will probably jump thirty points within the hour.

Ken isn't perfect. The Kaiser was perfect, but Ken isn't. Ken is trying too late to look like an attentive student. His classmates are seeing the newest side of him—which is now the only side of him. One half is missing. The Chosen destroyed that other perfect half. He doesn't even know who he is anymore.

"Please comment, though not at length, about the relationship between the girl's mountain-watching and the barren wasteland the bar is in the middle of," the teacher says. Some of the students smirk, because they know the answer, because this question is so _easy_. Obviously their teacher is trying to catch Ken off-guard with so simple a question. "You may start."

The wolves stir restlessly when Ken does not launch into an immediate explanation that would leave the best of his colleagues devastated by his brilliance. Ken is caught in a loop of thoughts, one that cannot deviate away from a series of images involving shotguns and wildernesses and the sickly green-and-yellow linoleum of a kitchen someone famous used to cook dinner in. There are snapshots of blood, Wormmon's sacrifice, book signings, atrocities committed against Digimon, a silent typewriter and a sheet left curled under the roller, Motomiya calling for him to come back—_please come back! Please!_

_Join us, Ken! Join the Chosen! We're your friends!_

He looks helplessly around the room, fake smile twitching, and the teacher lifts both eyebrows when it becomes obvious that Ken isn't even going to bother improvising an answer to this easy question. That is to say, _the genius does not have a response._ Jaws fall open up and down the rows of desks, tongues drooping, and the smell of spilled blood stokes the students' hunger. The wolves are starving for red meat. Elsewhere eyes widen—some are filling with disbelief and others with a sinking sort of pleasure that feels similar to but more glorious than fear.

"I'm here and waiting for you," the teacher says. "You cannot comment at all?"

Any valid excuse escapes Ken along with eloquence that might have not belonged to him in the first place.

"Well?"

"No," Ken says in a tightly controlled voice.

The room breathes in collectively. The end of times has come. The seventh seal is breaking.

"No?"

Embarrassment warms his face. "No, I cannot comment."

"This is a shock. If I recall correctly from my last term with you, you usually had some sparkling observation to enlighten us with before you returned to being an ass of considerable intelligence." The teacher slides an old and well-loved bookmark into his textbook and closes the cover. "Perhaps you have been pretentious all along, Ichijouji-san. Can you say anything about the story? Or is this speechlessness now an anomaly I ought to expect from you?"

There are many things Ken can say, but he resents _I don't know_ because it will satisfy them and make them all hunger for more. They want to destroy him and then destroy what trace amounts of him that are left over. _I don't know_ admits defeat. _I don't know _admits the Kaiser was stronger than kind little Ken will ever be. In his pocket is the Crest of Kindness, and he wishes desperately that he could take it out and hold it close. It always warms easily from his touch.

"Still, you say nothing! I do not want to threaten you as though you were a child," the teacher says. He is cruel because Ken _is _a child—this classroom is full of children. "One redemptive answer will make me leave you alone for the remainder of the class. Answer this: _What are the story's characters talking about? _Hemingway never explicitly says what the topic of conversation is."

Balancing the shotgun between your feet must be hard, Ken thinks wildly. There is no other way to pull the trigger except for when you prop it up like that. It must be really hard. Once that's done, though, there comes the fast click-whiz-bang of retirement. Your legacy fans across the floor and sprays the wall. And then your fourth wife returns home and finds this, and she has to let the world know that you've stepped out forever. Their icon is dead and the sickly green-and-yellow linoleum needs cleaning.

Someone raises his hand. Then someone else does. Soon there are hands reaching up from everywhere in the room at once, even hands of students who weren't paying attention until now. Ken feels humiliated. Finally he is being torn down from the high horse that the Kaiser rode with impunity; finally he has reached an understanding with his own inherent inferiority. The limelight clicks off—and from inside the new darkness, one untouched by even the fluorescent lights, he looks at these raised hands and wishes for a shotgun.

"Can anyone help out Ichijouji-san?" the teacher asks the wave of hands. He picks out one located near the back, one more relaxed than the straining others. "You. Please come to the front of the room to speak."

Ken cannot move back to his desk to sit down. His brain has forgotten how to unlock his knees. The constricted blood cannot reach his brain soon enough; he begins to feel light-headed as the new, more reliable student parts the desks and moves to the chalkboard. The answerer is Osamu, his brother, who is wearing a casual smirk and a Tamachi uniform with far more style than Ken ever could. He is three years Ken's senior and he shouldn't be here—he should be in preparatory school getting ready for college entrance examinations. But then Ken remembers that Osamu is dead and should actually be buried under seven feet of cold earth in a little cemetery that is too quiet and always covered in dead leaves no matter which season it is.

In the classroom, it smells like an early morning. There are dead leaves on the floor and crushed marble lines the junction between floor and wall. The poster that once advocated reading is now emblazoned with the silhouette of a crucifix and a full moon. Osamu smirks at the students, at Ken specifically, and then turns around to retrieve a piece of chalk from the tray. The chalk is damp and smears his skin. He writes DARWINISM on the board in giant blocky letters using the handwriting delicacy of a small child. The teacher nods approvingly.

"Ken-chan?" Osamu asks, his back turned. He smudges the D as an afterthought. "The story's characters are talking about _abortion_."

"Oh," Ken says. Now he remembers. The operation the American man speaks of—abortion. "All right?"

"The termination of pregnancy. The failure of a plan." His brother sets down the chalk and takes off his glasses. While he speaks, he cleans them on the front of his school-issued shirt. "Both of these definitions apply to the story, but I'm sure you understand that the characters talk about the former. There are many ways to abort a fetus. It depends on how much money the woman has and how far along she is in the pregnancy."

"May I sit down?" Ken asks the teacher, even though he cannot move.

"Remain standing," the teacher says.

"You should be fully aware of what I'm saying, so stay here. We can't have you drifting off." Osamu replaces his glasses and retrieves the chalk to begin scribbling several diagrams on the board. "How far along in the pregnancy do you think the girl was, Ken-chan?"

"How should I know?"

"Don't be offended," Osamu says with a smile full of teeth. "I think she was no further along than three months—which would be twelve weeks. When a baby is twelve weeks old, there are two main methods of abortion: suction aspiration, or dilation and curettage." He sketches out a long, thin tool that has a hollow scoop on its top. "How much money do you think she has?"

Pause. "Very little," Ken says warily.

"That's right. So let's say she has to seek out a dilation and curettage procedure to remove the fetus, but since she has very little money, she cannot have it done in a respectable hospital. She has to visit someone who might not even have a doctor's license." Osamu draws a stick figure that is frowning and pressing handless arms to its sheer waist. After circling the thin tool, he draws an arrow from it to the stick figure. "This tool is the curette the unlicensed doctor would use, whether he purchased it legally or stole it from a hospital. You insert it into the woman, slice up the baby, and then scrape out the cervix."

"Why are you telling me this?" Ken shrills. "I don't want to hear this! Stop!"

"Giblets. The baby looks like giblets." The chalk falls from Osamu's white fingers and breaks apart when it hits the floor. He reaches into his pocket and closes his fingers around something. "You were going to look like giblets."

Ken starts. "What are you talking about?"

"Our parents never told you that you were an accident, now did they?" Osamu reveals his hand: held gently between his fingers like a pencil is a thin metal rod. It is a surgical instrument. While the real thing appears more streamline and silvery than the one drawn with chalk, it is the same curette that has been described. However, the scooped top—sharp, hollow, nasty—is more fearsome than the drawing lets on. "They wanted to use this on you. You were going to look like giblets. That's what the Internet told me, and I couldn't stop crying for you. I couldn't let them turn you into a wet handful of protein meant for the disposal."

"That isn't true," Ken whispers, his skin is crawling with disgust and déjà vu. "That just isn't true."

"My baby brother was an accident and our parents were going to ameliorate that," Osamu says. The curette shines dangerously as it exchanges hands. "It was the second month when our mother realized something was wrong. She whispered to our father and he whispered back, and then I spent the day at a friend's house while they made an emergency trip to the doctor. That was how they found out about the second pregnancy, and there was no hiding the truth from me."

Numbness settles into Ken's mind, but no matter how disconnected and light he feels, his knees refuse to unlock and let him sit down. The curette is a terrible device and soon it has him hypnotized, winking the way it does, its silver contrasted starkly against Osamu's white hands.

"I saved your life, Ken-chan. You owe me for that. You're here because I told them that I wanted a little brother. I would keep an eye out for him. I would love him."

"And you would feed him and walk him too," Ken blurts out.

"Maybe you were something of a pet." It is an honest answer. Osamu considers the curette and then pushes away from the chalkboard. "You were mine, though, and that's what mattered. We were always together."

Ken feels the frustration and humiliation returning, tearing through the fear that has fallen around his body like a cloak. "Onii-san's pet. Is that all I am?"

"I took care of you," Osamu laments, "and how did you pay me back? You killed me."

An ambulance outside steadily approaches from the east. The siren warbles higher and higher as it passes in front of the school. Far away, louder, louder, closer, right in front of them and makeing the ceiling reverberate. Dust trickles down from the modern tiles in thin ribbons. Physics is not dead.

Ken yells, "That wasn't my fault! I didn't mean it, I didn't mean it—I didn't mean it!"

Going, going, loudest, softer now, moving away, less dust. The air is thick with dust, but the ceiling is not shaking down anymore. Softer, softer, fading away . . . and then, gone.

"You wished for me to disappear, and so I did." Osamu smiles humorlessly and slaps the curette's scoop onto his opposing palm to produce a dull, fleshy sound. "You really wanted me to die, and so I did. It's sort of ironic how that all turned out, don't you think? Karma can be such a bitch, but now it is working in my favor, for my justice."

Ken looks between the curette and his brother apprehensively. "What do you mean?"

"I think it is fairly conspicuous," Osamu says. "I am here to ameliorate the situation that our parents had been planning to. It took me a while to make amends with my death, but I think I've finally accepted it. And that means you have to accept something too."

"There is—"

The curette curls up in a shining rush, sharp top blazing like a comet, and thrusts into Ken's chest between the fourth and fifth ribs. His voice expires immediately when the left lung is punctured.

"That slid in so easily," Osamu remarks. He slings his free arm around Ken's waist, keeping them both standing together as Ken descends into shock, and he grins to the point of derangement. His breath smells like licorice. "I was expecting it to go into you like an awl through leather. Do you feel it in there?"

"Nghk," Ken splutters. He cannot seem to get enough air into his lungs and back out again to speak well. Liquid warmth sluices down his chest; it stains his uniform dark red and rushes over his brother's white hands. "You . . ."

Osamu wiggles the curette and its hollow scoop rips mercilessly through the alveolar bed. Ken can feel blood welling up in his throat, and he coughs once, splattering his attacker with a bright mouthful of life.

"Now it's time for your abortion," Osamu croons, licking at the blood on his own chin. "This is an awfully simple abortion, Ken-chan."

Gently, as if he were cradling a doll, Osamu helps Ken to kneel and then from there lays him down on the floor. Ken weakly presses his hands to the mortal wound, fingers curling around the blood-covered metal rod inserted into his abdomen. His pose bears a striking resemblance to the chalk-drawn stick figure that is clutching her womb. Dead leaves swirl and crackle. The teacher smiles and the students, the pack of wolves, are morphing and contorting in anticipation of a feast.

Now there is a curtain hung in the doorway to the classroom, one made from simple strings of wooden beads that only let in trickles of light and suspended dust. Beyond the curtain, existence goes on. Ken can hear the river murmuring, the train station bustling, life thriving, and he imagines the pale mountains that look like white elephants are standing silent, beautiful, and icy behind all else.

"I fell in love with you and now you're gone," Osamu is saying from a distance as far away as the mountains. "We had communication problems. We should have talked things out. We should have let all the air in before it was too late."


	6. six

_Author's Notes: This chapter is long overdue. Thanks to all of you who have supported me thus far._

_I don't like this chapter very much, but I still kept it in for some reason.  
_

Nightmares in adulthood are often associated with outside stressors or exist concurrently with another mental disorder. Ken just wishes they would stop.

* * *

**

* * *

**

Oneirophobia

**

* * *

**

**

* * *

**

**6.**

He pushes down the starchy collar and looks at the barcode on his neck again. The black lines vary in width, match in length, and dwarf the neatly printed numbers "702012 000737" that sit beneath them. His fingernail scratches the barcode and the ink doesn't smudge. Around it the skin is bruised purple, sensitive to the touch, and he knows that this tattoo is real and not some cheap press-on he could have bought with pocket change. In the mirror he can see more than just the barcode: he studies his curving neck, slim jaw, thin lips, watery eyes, and sheath of blue hair that he is holding back right now between curled thumb and forefinger so that he can better see.

The barcode is a cleanly printed tattoo, despite its location. The artist had very sure hands. Ken cannot remember receiving it.

When he doesn't want to look anymore, he lets go of the collar and it instantly returns to its default position. Fabric softener is a foreign convenience here. His clothes crackle and crease terribly at all the joints, especially around his elbows and knees, and he has to move carefully to prevent the cloth from chafing the smoothest skin of his inner thighs. He looks in the mirror, flattens a crease that runs along his shoulder like an old battle scar, and watches it reappear when he removes his hand. The mirror itself is a plain piece of equipment, stainless steel and not much else, but there is a little tray for a toothbrush and a bar of scented soap. Whatever the soap is made of always causes his skin to break out into a rash, so he avoids using it and thus feels constantly dirty. But every time he wakes up he finds a clean set of clothes, which prevents him from going insane due to an otherwise never-ending companionship with filth. He picks up the toothbrush, turns on the faucet, and waits until the water doesn't look so brownish-red. The toothpaste tastes like bubblegum. The water tastes like dirt even on good days.

Once finished, he dries both hands on his shirt, leaving big dark splotches that break up the monotony of grayness on and around him. The floor is gray stone, the walls are gray stone, the basin is gray stone; the mirror frame is shiny gray, the toothbrush is old and gray, the soap is lusterless gray; the single light fixture is covered in a mesh of gray wire that causes even the light to lose its color. At first he hated that muted light because it never turned off and hence sleep didn't come easily—but anymore he has no trouble falling sleep. Exhaustion is an excellent tutor. It makes you desperate.

His cot has a plain gray quilt and is anchored to the floor by fist-sized bolts that Ken cut his hands on during the one and only attempt at detaching a leg. He had planned to take the hefty leg and hit the gray walls until he found some indication of a hidden door, since there was no obvious way in or out of his room. Unscrewing the bolts with his bare hands, however, proved impossible. He had to suffer through the pain of pulverized flesh until he woke up the next day to find a bottle of peroxide and a mess of cotton swabs by the sink.

That failed escape happened twenty-three days ago according to the red-tinted gouges on the wall above his pillow, where he ticks off a day each time he lies down to sleep. He has no idea how many hours truly pass, but he trusts his estimations.

Aside from the mirror, the sink, the cot, and the toilet (gray stone that's icy on your _butt _no matter _what_), there is a wide silver vent on the wall about thirty-five feet up, installed beside a nondescript intercom speaker. White noise from the speaker accompanies an omnipresent chill that his gray quilt can't prevent. Every once in a while something disturbs the microphone of the outside world, causing whiny reverb to lance throughout the room; the mechanical squeals hit the walls and scatter, dying quickly, their waves nullifying each other. One time there was an actual voice that gravely asked, "Where are you?" No amount of pleading could get it to come back.

There are no windows. As mentioned, there are also no doors. The giant room is vaguely oblong—and hasn't a chance for corners—with the amenities in the center and his cot held against the curved wall. Climbing the wall to reach the wide silver vent didn't work because the stone was too smooth; he lost one fingernail in the effort, suffered through another night of hot pain, and found a mysterious gift of disinfectant and adhesive bandages by the sink when he awoke. His hand is still throbbing.

He reclines on the gray cot, presses his feet close together because they feel like blocks of ice, and waits for food. Only pastes contained in blank gray tubes are supplied to him, and he has developed an unsatisfying game of guessing which tube will contain which flavor. It's his only entertainment.

Like Pavlov's dog, Ken has adhered to the certain pattern of this prison: close your eyes, and you will receive. It started with sleep and needed materials being delivered while he was unconscious; now he can wait with his eyes closed and sightlessly observe the same result. After he does close his eyes, he will hear a distinct _whir-whir-click-click-click _and the clatter of a tray as it hits the ground. A watched pot never boils, and all that.

_Whir-whir-click-click-click._ _CLACK. _The tray is sitting there by the sink with a collection of tubes lying atop it.

After retrieving the tray, he places it on the cot and sits down again. He selects the left-most tube and unhappily predicts that it will be "salad with too much vinegar." He pops off the tube's lid and squeezes a line of thick, gooey paste into his mouth. The flavor doesn't register at first—his brain is forgetting the nuances tastebuds can identify—but he eventually decides it tastes like a mouthful of pork that has been sitting outside in direct sunlight for too long. The other pastes are more edible, although their flavors are run-of-the-mill cheese and carrots and something else that might be spiced apples. So long as most tubes aren't spoilt, he doesn't care.

"What is this—_1984_?" Ken asks suddenly, halfway through the last tube, and his voice sounds flat. Dead. He shivers.

After he feels somewhat sated, he begins the painstakingly slow process of making another gouge in the wall, because soon he will sleep. But then—

_Whir-whir-click-click-click—_

His eyes are open; he hears that distinctive sound out of sequence, turns around quickly in his surprise, gets his legs entangled in the gray quilt, and discovers that something substantial has deigned to give him company.

A strange man is standing over by the sink and there is no indication of how he arrived beyond the familiar sound that inducted his appearance. He has long, dark hair and looks rather like a freshly risen corpse—a haunting vampire with sunken eyes, peeling mouth, and skin paler than milk. His white lab coat is out of place amid the gray room: it is frank and expensive-looking with its tightly lashed belts, neatly pressed collar, and line of shiny gold buttons down the center that serve no practical purpose. The identification badge clipped to his breast pocket is laminated and unblemished, and as sterile as his quaint smile.

"How are we today?" the man asks. He is holding a legal pad in one hand and a cheap ballpoint pen in the other, and the way he wields them suggests that he is a _professional_. He busily begins writing even though Ken is too stunned to reply at first. "Any change since I last visited you?"

"Who are you?" Ken demands. The man looks familiar, but all Ken can remember are these gray walls and how they have encompassed him since—well, _since_. His memories go back to a certain point and then become muddled. "Why are you keeping me in here?"

"You don't remember? At all?"

"I wouldn't be asking if I did."

"You are here because your behavior has been deteriorating," the man says. "Lately you've exhibited very aggressive tendencies, Ken. We've been pretty worried about your safety ever since you managed to break the mirror in your last room, and that's why we moved you to a room that has extra precautions."

Gesturing, the man indicates the mirror above the sink. Ken now notices a thick sheet of plastic overlapping the reflective surface . . . and this is plastic he could have sworn wasn't there minutes ago. The plastic is bolted down much like the cot is; curiously, these bolts are also tinted red from failures to remove them. He doesn't remember trying to unscrew the bolts, but he knows he wanted to remove both them and the plastic so that he could destroy that mirror too.

"But where am I really?" Ken asks, confused. "Who are you?"

The man sighs and lifts his shoulders, flexing a certain joint until he hears the satisfying pop of stiff cartilage slipping back into place. "My name is Oikawa Yukio-sensei. You know that."

_Oikawa? Oikawa Yukio? _Suddenly Ken remembers everything: brother, funeral, Digital World, e-mails, Dark Ocean, Kaiser, Chosen, salvation, redemption, darkness, and Oikawa's twitching smile. The kidnapping. The old van that smelt of cabbage and sweat. The scanning of the dark seed. The children who wanted become him; the children who wanted to have a copy of the dark seed implanted in their necks so they could become super-smart drones; the children who wanted to be successful and popular even if it meant becoming avatars of evil. And—

Oikawa keeps scribbling on the legal pad and Ken feels too ill to think.

Ken clutches the barcode tattoo on his neck, tears the skin with his fingers, and begins coughing hard enough to regurgitate undigested paste that is warm and sticky and smells terrible. Within seconds Oikawa is on top of him and soon other people from seemingly out of nowhere join in; they wrestle Ken into submission, in the process getting smeared in his vomit and blood, and someone shouts for a sedative. One nearby woman preps a syringe and Ken gags on an acrid sob.

"No, that's too much," Oikawa says roughly. "A little less of that, if you please. That's good. Right above his elbow."

A sharp, hot pain spreads through Ken's forearm. He screams and thrashes about, fighting his detainees, but they remain atop him until the sedative sets in and he stops struggling. Once he relaxes, they back away and disappear like ghosts through the gray walls. Oikawa stays and talks as though his minions are still there.

"I think some of the aggression has to do with the dosage. To curb his hallucinations I brought up the lithium, which appears to have had serious consequences. We'll have to steadily lower the dosage back to where it was and find something else as treatment."

"Oikawa," Ken hisses through his teeth. The world is swimming and he wants to feel angrier, but the sedative's peculiar heat—now fanning out along his spine—makes it difficult to concentrate on any one emotion. "Oikawa, what are . . ."

"You should feel better now," Oikawa says to Ken, bending down to retrieve the fallen legal pad and ballpoint pen. "I normally frown upon doping up my patients, but sometimes the situation just calls for it. I think you'd agree if you were in my shoes."

Ken rolls his eyes back to look at the ceiling, which seems remarkably closer now. It has several sets of lights instead of the one mesh-enclosed bulb from before. But then the lights are far away again, cold and remote and individual—then close, mundane and united—far away, taunting and clouded . . . If he tries to focus on one version of the ceiling, his head hurts.

"Do you remember me now? You had such a strange response to my name! Inoue-sensei is fetching the bandages for your neck, don't worry, but let's get started with our session while we wait." Oikawa sits down again and manages to look dignified even with smears of bodily fluids on his coat. "Your neck always interests you, whether you're scratching it or looking at it in the mirror or something else—why is that?"

"You should know," Ken says, and the words slur together. His tongue feels heavy, awkward, and too big for his mouth. "You put it on me."

The pen writes noisily. "I put _what _on you?"

"The barcode, which is . . . which is . . . how you're gonna scan the Dark Seed in me . . . 'cause you kidnapped me and all of those kids . . ."

Oikawa looks at him knowingly. "Oh, that's right. One of your hallucinations is about me being an abductor of some sort. What am I using the 'Dark Seed' for, again?"

"You're not gonna _use_ the Dark Seed—you're gonna _scan_ it. The children want to become me, and to do that you have to transplant some of my darkness into them."

"I visited you this morning. You claimed that you hadn't experienced any hallucinations in at least a few days," Oikawa says. "The lithium must be responsible—I'm certain now. We're working hard to find the right balance of medications for you."

"You weren't here this morning," Ken mumbles. "I would've remembered. This is the second time you've come for me. The first was to get a scan of the Dark Seed."

From where he is resting, Ken can see the ballpoint pen create line after line of symbols on the paper; the handwriting is so heavy that sometimes ink bleeds through onto the yellow page beneath it. Oikawa doesn't stay within the lines.

_Scratch scratch scratch, flip-flick, scratch scratch sc-scratch._

"You don't remember my visit from four hours ago?"

"I've been here for twenty-three days." For confirmation, Ken looks at the gouges on the wall. "No one has come in that time. No one has spoken through the intercom more than once."

Unabated, Oikawa replies, "You've been here for three months, Ken."

"Twenty-three days!" he says, alarmed. His head is starting to clear up, but his tongue remains slow, hindering effective communication. "I mean—okay—so maybe my timekeeping isn't great because I have no idea when it's light and when it's dark. But I've been counting the times I've had to sleep . . . look, right here . . ." He rubs his fingers over the gouges in the stone. They are rough and cool on his sore fingertips; they are something _he _made in a room his captors otherwise manufactured.

"There's nothing over there," Oikawa says slowly. No matter how much he squints or how hard he looks, the stone is smooth. "Furthermore, you don't have anything that could scratch the stone. You know items like that are expressly forbidden in the patient wards."

Ken frowns and rubs the gouges again, but now they are suspiciously less pronounced. Once he lifts his head, which takes a lot of effort on his part because it weighs a ton, he sees that the wall is blank like Oikawa had said. His insides contract and his vision dims down to a circle incorporating only his hand and that portion of the wall.

"That is impossible! It takes me hours to make a mark, but I get it done. They haven't gone away like this before now. What did you do?"

"There were never any marks on the wall," Oikawa says. Nurse Inoue returns with fresh bandages, some cotton swabs, and a dark bottle of iodine. "Now hold still, okay? This might sting a little and I don't want to have you restrained again."

Ken merely whimpers when an iodine-soaked swab moves over his neck. The cuts aren't too bad, which Oikawa is thankful for, and soon thereafter he unwraps a wide bandage for placement over the disinfected area. The air smells largely aseptic, overpowering the mustiness from the faucet and that hint of cypress leaking in from somewhere very far away.

"Stop it—stop it—"

"This hallucination is much stronger than the others. What do you remember before your alleged twenty-three day imprisonment began?"

"I was helping out the Chosen," Ken gurgles behind a fresh onslaught of tears. "I was having sleepovers with Daisuke-kun and I was so happy for once . . ."

"Daisuke-kun?" Oikawa asks, flipping back through the legal pad to consult another session's notes. "Motomiya Daisuke, right? He seems to come up a lot."

"Daisuke-kun is real!" Ken exclaims, but his indignation is lukewarm. "He is coming to save me. I know him. He won't let you get away with this."

"It seems that 'Daisuke-kun' was someone you wanted to see dead in another one of your hallucinations," Oikawa says. He flips back a few more pages. "I thought your likening of him to a gnat was especially poignant. We had to strap you down; you spit on anyone trying to hold you, and at that point we hadn't finished running tests on your blood to see if you had any afflictions."

"I never wanted to see Daisuke-kun dead," Ken says, scandalized. "He's my best friend. Maybe the Kaiser wanted to kill him, but you were responsible for that bastard anyway. It wasn't my fault!"

"The drugs don't seem to be working as well as they should be." Oikawa presses two fingers against his own forehead. "Maybe you've finally built up an immunity to them. Experimentation is definite now, and it will be unpleasant, and I don't get paid enough to do this. But right now I want you to close your eyes, take a deep breath, and repeat after me: _It isn't real._"

Ken shakes his head. "It is real."

"_It isn't real_."

"You took away my childhood, you hurt my friends, you killed my brother!"

"Your name is Ichijouji Ken. You are thirteen years old. You are an only child. _It isn't real._"

"My brother's name is Osamu! He's four years older than I am and he's a genius!"

"You're an only child. You're a sick little boy who needs a lot of help. You're going to have to work with me if you want to get any better."

"The children don't want to become me!"

"Ken—"

"They don't want to become me! They don't want to become me!"

Oikawa tries to say more, but Ken screams to block out his voice. There is no further reasoning to be done today, so Oikawa smiles sadly and motions to Nurse Inoue. He leaves promptly while the nurse moves in with another syringe, this one filled with a drug guaranteed to knock out the delirious patient.

Oikawa hates this part of his job. He hates having to go back to his office where Ken's parents are waiting for the latest verdict. _Is our son getting any better? When will he be ready to come home?_ He hates doing this with everything he has left in him.

_We miss him. We miss him a lot._

The other patients hear Ken as he fights the needle; inspired by his opposition, they create lonely ruckuses of their own. Oikawa pauses at the end of the ward, keycard in hand, and looks back down the plain hallway at the all doors that are closed and locked securely. He thinks of each of his patients. They tell you in school that this is the best modern medical science can do.

But Oikawa knows it will never be enough.


	7. seven

_Author's Notes: It's an experiment. Sorry for the wait and this chapter's probably disappointing uniqueness. This is undoubtedly the shortest chapter._

Nightmares in adulthood are often associated with outside stressors or exist concurrently with another mental disorder. Ken just wishes they would stop.

* * *

**

* * *

**

Oneirophobia

**

* * *

****

* * *

**

**7.**

"Hi."

"Hello."

.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.

_I think you're beautiful.  
_.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.

"It's nice out, huh?"

Ken smiles at Daisuke.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.

_I think you're _really _beautiful.  
_.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.

Ken and Daisuke are standing together on a pier somewhere in America, and it is almost evening.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.

"Ken?"  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.

Their hands are about to touch on the railing.

_I don't know who moved first . . .  
_.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.

_I think it was you.  
_.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.

"Daisuke . . ."  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.

Ken moves first.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.

He—  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.

—stabs Daisuke—  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.

—in the—  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.

—stomach—  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.

—with a knife typically used to—

.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.

—eviscerate game fish.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.

_Your blood is the same color as mine. Heh.  
_.  
.  
.  
.

**Red.**  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.

_Does that make me a human like you, or does that make you a monster like me?  
_.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.

Later, when it is darker and Daisuke's internal organs look like giant dark gemstones half-hidden inside a ribbed cave, Ken climbs up onto the pier's railing.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.

"I love you."  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.

Ken leans forward and falls into the ocean.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.

And the gratuitous amount of Daisuke's blood on his clothes immediately attracts a tiger shark.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.

_I think this is the only gift I can give to you.  
_.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.

**_So may I wake up now?  
_**.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.


	8. eight

_Author's Notes: I'm finally on Spring Break._

Nightmares in adulthood are often associated with outside stressors or exist concurrently with another mental disorder. Ken just wishes they would stop.

* * *

**

* * *

**

Oneirophobia

**

* * *

**

**

* * *

**

**8.**

The train station is mostly empty except for Ken and a few stragglers dozing on the other benches. It's bland to the point of eeriness in strong fluorescent lights, tessellated floors, and tellers' booths with dark glass fronts that reflect his dejected posture. He sits by himself and waits for Daisuke's train to arrive, although the train Daisuke was supposed to have been on already came and went almost three hours ago. All he has left is the hope that Daisuke was late catching his train, per usual, and had to take another without notice.

His fingers curl tighter around the aluminum pan in his lap, its plastic top opaque from the steam of an apple pie that has since gone cold. The apple pie is a gift his mother baked for this special homecoming occasion, because Ken and Daisuke haven't seen each other face-to-face in three years and she always said that food broke the ice better than words did.

Ryo walks out of the public restroom, drying his hands on a wad of paper towels. He bounces up on his tiptoes, shoots the wad at the nearest trashcan, misses, shrugs, and then sits down next to Ken. "Don't you think we should head on home?" he suggests, slumping over, the paradigm of boredom. They've been here for—like—_ever_; there haven't been any signs of Daisuke yet, not even a phone call.

"Hold this, please," Ken says and drops the apple pie onto Ryo's lap.

Ken reaches into the pocket of his windbreaker and pulls out a cell phone. The screen is blank except for a poorly rendered picture of a sunset and a digital clock. He checks MISSED CALLS two screens over to see no new numbers listed.

Restlessly, Ryo shifts the apple pie around and smiles at Ken pitilessly. The silence is terrible, broken only by the cell phone's beeps as Ken scrolls through all of the options to ensure the correct server provider has been selected and that call-forwarding isn't turned on. Once he is grimly satisfied that everything is as it should be, Ken starts a game of Snake that lasts almost thirteen rounds before the pixels bite into its own "tail" like the Oroborus.

"We talked last night," Ken says finally. "We talked last night for hours. He seemed really excited about coming home."

"So why did he leave in the first place?"

Holding back on the harshest, truest response is a lot harder than Ken had anticipated.

Years ago, before all of this shit happened, Ryo simply returned to the real world after an absence that might as well have been as long as a lifetime. He simply returned when he wasn't needed—_of all times_, when Daisuke was in that paranoid-yet-in-denial stage of a budding relationship with Ken. It was a time when Daisuke and Ken would have dinner together almost every night; they would make small talk and spend hours looking at each other without really knowing why. Either man could have listed, if pressed, any number of aesthetic or charming things about the other. And then there was Ryo.

That turning point happened three years ago, a long time for Ken and hardly a blip on the radar for all existence. Daisuke and Ken had a customary dinner together, bumped foreheads while arguing at the register over who was going to pay, and convened in Ken's apartment for an impromptu sleepover that led to heavy nostalgia and a somewhat platonically shared bed. (Their hands did not wonder anywhere risqué, but Daisuke learned the texture of Ken's hair and Ken learned the average rate of Daisuke's heartbeat.) On that fateful morning Ken opened his door to insistent knocking and found Ryo standing behind it, looking like death warmed over and carrying a suitcase filled with dirty clothes and the broken pieces of a foreign Digivice.

"Daisuke was jealous," Ken says. "He was jealous of you, since you knew me first. Daisuke and I both said some pretty nasty things to each other during those next few weeks, and he left not too long after our worst fight."

Ryo had been his best friend, and together they had saved the Digital World an even longer time ago than the three years since anyone had seen Daisuke. The intended target of Millenniumon's Dark Seed, Ryo had been saved when Ken knocked him out of the way and took in the darkness instead. Ken didn't remember much about the time he spent in the Digital World, honestly, but he still knew who Ryo was. Daisuke didn't. Knee-deep in that paranoid-yet-in-denial stage of a budding relationship with Ken, Daisuke didn't know how to handle the sudden appearance of someone who called his Ken a best friend, a confidant, a savior—worst of all, a _partner_. Ken had been partnered with Ryo before he had even known Daisuke existed.

Daisuke had the alarming disposition to snap at anyone who approached Ken in friendship if they provided an ample threat to the budding relationship. Now he was fighting against a former best friend, a former _partner_! He was fighting against someone who Ken opened his apartment to until alternative arrangements were made, and . . .

"I remember," Ryo says to the apple pie. "He bluntly said, 'You're mine!' that one day and you two got into a really bad fight. I didn't mean for that to happen. I just didn't have anywhere else to go."

"There were many fights besides that one," Ken murmurs. "If I want to be perfectly honest with myself, I blame you. But that's unfair of me."

"I'm sorry."

Ken powers through seven rounds of Snake, and then his concentration breaks because the train tracks are vibrating again. They produce a low noise, like a voice yelling behind glass, which escalates into a squeal that shatters the peace of the empty station. Less than a minute later the train appears from around the bend, kicking up errant sparks, and finally pulls to a stop. Ken sits up straight, drops his cell phone in the scramble to retrieve the apple pie, and watches the train's doors too eagerly.

That yearning, hopeful expression doesn't leave Ken's face until the final passenger stumbles out of the car, yawning and swinging his arms like Daisuke might have—but he isn't Daisuke. Most passengers leave the station immediately and a few others wait for their rides, but in the end there is no one left except for those still dozing, and Ken and Ryo.

"It took us years to patch things up," Ken says brokenly. "When I said that he should come back, if only for a visit, he agreed!"

"Maybe something happened and he can't call," Ryo says.

"Very little could keep Daisuke from doing what he wants. I think that's been proven well enough already."

"Sometimes people just grow apart." Ryo stubs his tennis shoe on the dirty floor. Over by the bathroom, a bleary janitor leans on his mop handle and tries to stay awake; the air is heavy with ammonia and hints of apples, burnt cinnamon, and dust. "There is more at work here than you want to realize, Ken."

"Daisuke hates me. He hates me and this is how he's getting back at me," Ken laments. He knocks his knuckles on the apple pie's plastic cover and the sound is hollow. "I've been trying so hard to get him to come back! And now there's somehow more at work than my begging him for forgiveness?"

"Ken . . . Daisuke is gone. You keep forgetting that."

"I talked to him last night—"

"For three hours you talked to the voice recording of a woman who relayed the time and occasionally asked if you wished to speak to an operator."

"You can't know that!"

"It's the only thing that makes sense. You hadn't mentioned him in years, and as of this past week you became convinced he had forgiven you. You repeatedly said that you were going to get back together with him and resolve some sort of tension that has existed between you two since you were kids." Ryo smiles without warmth. "Daisuke died a week ago, didn't he?"

Fiercely: "No!"

"You deleted the answering machine message, but I found out about it anyway. You started acting weird right around that time."

Ken watches the train pull out of the station and his hands curl into fists. "That's not true! He hates me. This is how he's getting back at me—staging his death. He wants me to worry and regret and feel guilty before he comes home and we're able to make amends. I never got the chance to apologize before, but now . . ."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"He's not dead, Ryo!"

"They said his blood alcohol level was .401 when they found him. There's no way he could have survived with that toxicity level in his bloodstream. I'm willing to bet he suffocated from his own vomit."

"He and I were both so stubborn when it came to our pride. How could he think I didn't love him anymore? How could he? Three years!"

"His funeral is happening tomorrow and you don't know what to do. You don't know if his family will forgive you . . . or if your mutual friends will either."

Ken looks at him suspiciously. "How are you being so insightful? You're never like this."

Ryo bears his teeth; they are straight and even, clean, and his breath probably smells like minty mouthwash and the edge of apple pie crust he stole when Ken wasn't looking. "Being dead teaches you many things, imbues you with wisdom. I have all the time in the world to think things through now, since there's no need to rush eternity."

"You're not dead either."

"Even my case file is dead. It has been cold for years. Someone jumped me on my way home from your apartment two years ago. Everyone thinks the attacker wanted to mug me, and they decided that I fought back and ended up being killed. They were never able to identify the murder weapon beyond what my lacerations suggested: a hunting knife that gutted me badly enough to make me bleed to death. My wallet was missing—which supported the mugging idea—and they never recovered it, although a few months later my fingerprint-free identification card was found inside a dumpster in another city. There were no eyewitnesses. It was the perfect crime because they didn't think it was born of any premeditated motivation."

"You're not dead."

"I can't blame you for being angry, or for hating me. Daisuke left you because of me. You planned my death well and never got caught for it. You did what you thought would make you feel better."

"I feel like shit," Ken says succinctly.

"Maybe that's my fault too. Who knows. You were the one who knocked me out of the way of the Dark Seed in the first place."

"I'm so confused . . ."

"You've been talking to my afterimage for two years. I'm sure Daisuke will stop by when he realizes he's dead and that he shouldn't hold grudges anymore. Maybe that will be good enough." Ryo reaches over and ghosts his fingers across Ken's windbreaker. It shifts a little. "We had something too, right? For a while, when you were desperate for touch and wanted to forget him."

"Don't do that."

"It isn't something that you can forget, Ken-chan," Ryo murmurs. The windbreaker moves again, although nothing is actually there to manipulate it. "When you're dead, these sorts of memories will haunt you—if you'll pardon the pun."

Ken watches the pale fingers ease down the zipper. They touch the dress shirt he chose for tonight's affair; they pick at the collar, fiddle with a button, and dangerously walk around the hem, searching for pathways to bare skin in a manner that causes déjà vu. There had been a time when Ryo had done this for real and Ken's memory is able to make the connection to that, but something else about this tickles the back of his throat like a long hair. Maybe these fingers came along in an older fantasy long since buried within his subconscious, to be called up during a hot shower or after waking up on mornings when his thoughts turn sexual rather than philosophical.

Ken tightens his jaw and wills Ryo's hand to move away. Ryo complies because he has to.

"You're not dead," Ken says as he pops off the apple pie's lid. The pie is cold now, but he digs his fingers into it and seizes a dry, fruity handful that is a little too heavy on the cinnamon and might be lacking in flour. "Do you want some?"

"You have some serious issues," Ryo says. He reaches over to take the offered handful; the apple pie looks plain and messy in his hand, and Ken feels infinitely better because there's nothing there to disprove this reality now. "One day you'll accept what has happened and actually go on to live your life. That's inevitable. And then maybe we can all apologize to one another."

Ryo snacks on his handful and Ken scoops out another. His mother didn't make this pie: she's dead too, as is his father, but he bought his childhood apartment anyway to go back home whenever he wanted for his favorite dinners and dinnertime conversations. The apple pie actually came from a little pastry place that sits on the corner of 24th and Speedway, even though Ken conveniently found it warming in the oven and thanked his mother for the forethought. Daisuke loved—_loves_—apple pies.

"I'm starting to feel desperate again," Ken says slowly.

The smile that Ryo courts around a mouthful of sticky fingers is lazy and interesting. "Don't you think we should head on home?"

"Maybe once we finish this."

Another handful disappears into Ryo's mouth and

**_No!_**


	9. nine

_Author's Notes: This was also an experiment. Please excuse the confusion._

Nightmares in adulthood are often associated with outside stressors or exist concurrently with another mental disorder. Ken just wishes they would stop.

* * *

**

* * *

**

Oneirophobia

**

* * *

**

**

* * *

**

**9.**

It was, it is, it will be so hard to tell what the tense is . . .

.  
.  
.  
.  
.

He will be in a church—the same church they had the funeral for his brother in. Pews, rococo architecture, dark wood and stone, breathtakingly high ceilings, holy water, muted sunlight. Clarinet music that sounded like a sorrowful alto voice floats in invisible rings around the sheer columns, rotundas, balconies, altars. Sealed windows, brightened with sunlight, will provide stained glass depictions of saints and trumpeting angels and the sacred Trinity. _The music is so quiet, so pious, like the hushed voices of a church choir but not quite. _Soloist. Soaring.

On the far side of the church, where the Kaiser is waiting for him, there will be a wall lined from floor to ceiling with shelves of candles. Mismatched rainbow, wax drippings, diffused flames, giant brass snuffer, extinguished forever, smoke, clarinet music. There are (always always_ always_)small deaths here. Ken could see the mourners sitting on rotting pews, heads bowed, reverent before their Incomprehensible, hoping to build bridges to Heaven, crying unabashedly, hiding small denials and smaller smiles, running away without moving, taking cover. Alive. Breathing. Dead.

As he walked down the aisle, feeling rather like a bride but not as giddy as one, he gets caught on the wrist by one of the mourners. Strong grip, small fingers, whitening knuckles, too-bright smile under a funereal veil—a chessboard, black and white and black and white from the dark lace and whites of her eyes. Demanding, angry, mournful, terrified, curious, betrayed, hateful, loving, come home come home to me. Rosa will want to know the answers to questions never conceived. Early miscarriages.

"Why don't you ever dream about me?"

"I don't know."

"You always dream about Motomiya or the Kaiser."

Tears glint like the edges of knives as they trickled down her cheeks. The widower's shawl around her shoulders, the smudged eyeliner for a girl too young to be wearing makeup, the deathly grip, just barely hanging on, so lost in grief, about to be swept away. They met once(_fell in love_, she thinks, cradling her pillow and dreaming forever), but that was ages ago.

"Maybe."

"What about me? What about the rest of your friends?"

"Let me go."

"You sick fuck!" she will exclaim shrilly. "You don't even dream about your own Digimon!"

"Sure he does."

The Kaiser: smooth as cocoa butter, sophisticated, embarrassed fumbling in the shower, questions (what does it mean to be attracted to yourself?) and no answers and even less coherency, biting wrists, narcissismnarcissismnarcissismSTOP, breaking, bondage, pain, laughter in front of a mirror. _The altar he's leaning against is cold like a dead person's cheek, but twice as smooth. He pushes off of it, smiles, and walks closer._ No more clarinet music, but something lower and brassy will be there instead, something growing.

"Leave Ken alone!"

His smile was that of an angel's. "Wormmon is right over there."

The stone basin, glassy eyes, shriveled entrails, halos of flies, shit-smeared, terrible, an atrocity, strangely shaped knives with edges glinting like tears, SACRIFICE ("You'd do anything for me!"), broken exoskeleton, red on green like Christmas. _Help me._

"Stop it! Just go away!"

Be, sound, float, wait, able to, walk, want, drip, wait, stop, stop, stop, stop I want to wake up please don't make me have any more of these nightmares I can't I can't take it. Rain, sex, burros, collars, do you see, accidents, cooking, curettes, ocean. Claimed. Marked forever, damned, lost lost lost lost lost and in need the road map for life. Apples. Ryo's smile. _Help me_. Atonement. _Help me._

"_Ken!_"

Heart attack.

Treacherous gnat.

Useless, pathetic gnat.

_Help me_.

**Badum . . . badum . . . badum . . .**

_I'm sorry._

**Ba . . .**

"Why?"

_Goodbye._

.  
.  
.  
.  
._  
_

Now which tense did I choose?


	10. ten

_Author's Notes: I'm finally done with the spring semester. The wait for this chapter was a very long one, and I apologize. After this, there will be one more chapter (or an epilogue, I guess you could say). Please enjoy and thanks for reading._

Nightmares in adulthood are often associated with outside stressors or exist concurrently with another mental disorder. Ken just wishes they would stop.

* * *

**

* * *

**

Oneirophobia

**

* * *

**

**

* * *

**

**10.**

Laughter suits Daisuke best, Ken decides.

Daisuke laughs a lot whenever he is around Ken, but he mostly does it while they're playing soccer together. His laughter is not that born of scorn or superiority, but of genuine enjoyment in being lost to the athleticism of a friendly game. Even when Ken is losing, which is always temporary in any event, Ken never takes Daisuke's laughter the wrong way.

Two years before Ken is supposed to finally come to terms with his sexuality, he watches Hikari break up with Daisuke after a stressful relationship defined by the pair's mutual deceit, Hikari's disinterest, Daisuke's frustrated smiles, Ken's whitening knuckles under the table, and best friends' phone calls going back and forth at all hours of the night. In the aftermath, at three o'clock in the morning, Ken's cell phone—set to vibrate, not to ring aloud—lights up and makes an unmistakable mooing sound. Ken answers groggily and Daisuke sounds devastated.

They agree to play soccer. At three in the morning. Ken doesn't mind because Daisuke will feel better in the end. They meet in the park where they always play together, Daisuke with the soccer ball and Ken with an umbrella and set of plastic ponchos because it's pouring. Daisuke protests, but Ken forces a hot pink poncho over his head anyway and swears they won't play any more than three games with ten goals apiece. The first person to ten goals wins.

Without proper footwear, they slip and slide around the field as it grows slick with the sort of mud that doesn't stick to anything. Most goals are scored because of the mud: the defender suddenly becomes a goalkeeper who flounders helplessly around in the box, unable to find enough traction to block the ball as it sails past. Daisuke laughs the entire time and Ken feels happy.

Eventually—three games later—two boys covered in mud and soaked straight to the bone collapse together beneath the aluminum spectator stands. The umbrella is open above them and the curved handle is shared by one dark and one pale hand. Ken wipes the tears from Daisuke's cheeks that could be confused with raindrops. Daisuke smiles.

Ken knows that he is dreaming at this point. He also knows that things are going to turn out terribly, that this dream is going to become a nightmare. He grimaces when he understands.

"Is something wrong?" Daisuke asks. He looks feverish: his eyes are glittery with rain-tears and sickness, and his cheeks are flushed and hot.

"I don't want things to fall apart again," Ken whispers and places his forehead against his best friend's. "Please."

He knows that Daisuke is going to die because of the fever. Daisuke is going to pass out within a few minutes because stress and the weather have significantly weakened his immune system. Pretty soon Ken will be sitting in a hospital waiting room and it will be all Hikari's fault. She is to blame. Ken is still afraid of her influence over Daisuke, even though those days have long since elapsed in reality. Hikari makes Daisuke sick, Daisuke dies at too young an age, and then Ken grieves and slits his arm from elbow to wrist. Picture-perfect suicide. What a tragedy.But that hasn't happened yet; Ken has to sit here and wait for Daisuke to pass out and put the finale in motion. Ken is unable to change anything.

His dreams do this sometimes: they let him know that nothing is real and that lucidity cannot provide any great insight. Knowledge is worthless, but helplessness remains a fact.

"I'm dreaming," Ken says. His hands are as pale as paper and the blue lines of his veins show up distinctly. He turns his free hand over, marveling at the realness that once fooled his mind. "I'm dreaming. This isn't real."

Daisuke smiles and tilts his head, guiltlessly nudging his nose into the crook between Ken's jaw and neck. "I might be too," he says. His delirious flirtation is shameless.

In any other dream, Ken would enjoy this. He would enjoy this a lot. But he knows that Daisuke is going to start expectorating greasy phlegm pretty soon. "I want to wake up," he says. He moves away from Daisuke, who pursues him undeterred. "I don't want to do this!"

"Ichijouji . . ." For a moment Daisuke sounds distant and concerned, but then he replies as though Ken had said something completely different: "You won't hurt me like Hikari did, will you? I trust you."

"Please let me wake up." Ken shuts his eyes and doesn't try to stop a set of lips from smiling against his damp neck. Curious teeth begin to nibble on the skin, warming it in a way that Ken can feel but realizes isn't real. As soon as Daisuke says his name again, the nightmare will pick up speed.

A peculiar creaking noise interrupts the music that rain and their breaths collaborate to create. Ken ignores it and digs his heels into the mud puddle they're sitting in, discovers he can't breathe, and then kisses Daisuke anyway because he wants to and the dream lets him. He hears the creaking noise again, louder this time, and identifies it as metallic: metal rubbing against metal. This noise upsets his expectations for the dream, but he doesn't care. He pulls Daisuke closer and tastes his bottom lip and sheds rain-tears too.

His subconscious surprises him by making the aluminum stands collapse all at once, just like that, crushing them like gnats. The story of his life. What a tragedy.


	11. eleven: epilogue

_Author's Notes: I thought getting out of school for the summer would lead to a quick final update, but apparently not. But here it is—the last chapter of Oneirophobia. This fanfic has provided a lot of chance for me to experiment with writing, and the final chapter is no exception. I leave many things unsaid, because I want the readers—you—to fill in the blanks. Your ideas of what happened and what is going to happen are probably different from my own. This is okay. I am showing things to you, not telling. If you don't have any idea what this chapter is talking about by the time you finish, that's not your fault either._

_I conceived this idea on August 22, 2004. Its journey out of my head ends here._

Nightmares in adulthood are often associated with outside stressors or exist concurrently with another mental disorder. Ken just wishes they would stop.

* * *

**

* * *

**

Oneirophobia

**

* * *

**

**

* * *

**

**11.**

**And then Ken woke up.**

... 

..

.

"I had some bad dreams," Ken said softly. "I can't sleep."

Daisuke didn't reply, but his eyes were open and that sigh of his suggested he was cognizant of Ken enough to listen.

Although most of the dreams were sketchy at best, having evaporated upon waking, Ken took a deep breath and told Daisuke all he could remember. He didn't mince anything: the Kaiser's teeth were always sharp, and two loaves of challah bread needed FIVE (5) EGGS, and Daisuke and Ken killed each other in a variety of loving and hateful ways, and Ryo really liked apple pie, and Jun looked beautiful in wedding white, and Osamu's breath smelt like licorice, and Wormmon's innards did not bleed, and Oikawa was a doctor who tried too hard, and . . . and, . . . and, . . .

By the time Ken had finished, Daisuke was sitting up and looking right at him.

They were together in their apartment's cramped living room: Daisuke sat on a couch three inches too short for him while Ken stood behind it, close enough to touch Daisuke but afraid to. Daisuke looked down, looked at Ken again, and then looked at someplace in-between. _What do you want me to say?_ his body language asked in these quiet, weary moments. _Is there anything I can say after that?_

Last night, they had had a fight. It had been a fight in the making for weeks, though, built up with the tension derived from brief touches, clipped sentences, cool skin, and remarkable detachment and mistrust. Daisuke had screamed and Ken had cried in a girly, shameful way; Ken had fled into the bedroom, locking the door behind him, and Daisuke had stood outside of it for what seemed like hours, fumbling with excuses and too-late apologies. They had had a fight over everything and nothing, as couples were wont to do, but it was the final topic that had segued into a glimpse at the rawness and naivety of desperate love.

"There's nothing left in my lonely room without you," Ken said once he had the courage to.

"You have such a way with words," Daisuke said. His voice was bleak with tears he would never acknowledge. "Get over here, idiot."

The couch wasn't big enough for both of them to recline side by side, so Daisuke took Ken into his arms. Ken could still smell alcohol on Daisuke's clothes, the stiff and noxious kind that made him want to gag, but he didn't complain like he had last night.

"I'll tell you," Ken said softly. "I'll tell you everything you want to know—"

"Don't worry about it."

"It's just hard."

"I know," Daisuke whispered. His lips were dry and rubbery; when he wet them, he inadvertently licked the skin of Ken's neck that they were resting against. "I shouldn't have said . . . last night . . ."

"I'm sorry."

"What do you have to apologize for? I'm the one who started it, so I'm the one who's sorry."

"I'm still sorry!" Ken said defensively, although he wasn't anywhere near angry or even annoyed.

"It's just—there's a lot about you I don't know and can't reach. I should know you better than I do. I want you to stop having those dreams, and I want to be the reason why they stop."

"Daisuke . . ."

"I know. Shutting up now."

Ken grinned weakly. "But I think I might be ready."

"Huh?"

"It took something like last night to make me decide," he said. "There's just too much I've kept inside and let fester for years and years and didn't want you to see and heal. It might get harder for us if I let you in, but maybe . . ."

"It'll get better eventually," Daisuke said with conviction he hadn't possessed a weak ago. "If you're willing to trust me, anyway."

"I do. I always did. I should have said so sooner."

Daisuke finally smiled and Ken hesitated, as if he wanted to say more, but stopped there anyway.

"I appreciate your angst, but I think we should save the rest of this for the morning. Do you have any idea how late it is? I haven't been able to get to sleep yet!"

Ken frowned and leaned his head against the other man's chest. "I'm sorry. Go to sleep."

"Idiot," Daisuke said affectionately. "You're an idiot. Don't beat yourself up over this because you might have more bad dreams."

"Mm."

"You're afraid of so much, you know? I want to chase away some of that." Daisuke yawned. "But . . . seriously, it was kinda romantic in a twisted way when you killed me to preserve our relationship . . ."

"Only you would say something as weird as that."

"Remind me to never let you drive a car when you're distraught, or ever go on a vacation to America with you either."

"You're weird."

"And you're no less awe-inspiring. Also—this is the last thing, and it should be obvious—I'd kick the Kaiser's ass all over again if I could."

"But—"

"You're not him. You never were."

"Daisuke—"

"Two separate people sharing one body. Shut up."

"Insolent gnat."

"Hey!"

"But I believe you anyway," Ken said, mouthing the words against Daisuke's sternum.

"Oh . . ."

"And we have the morning for this, like you said."

"You tease. That's right."

"Yeah . . ."

"Mmhm . . ."

Ken didn't try to suppress his laughter. "Go to sleep, will you?"

"You first."

"Okay."

"Okay."

"Good_night_, Daisuke."

"Idiot."

**—-**

**end**

**—-**


End file.
